Monetizing The Mommyblog: An ABDPBT Personal Finance Series
This is the second in a series of posts on the topic of monetizing mommy blogs that I’ll be featuring on ABDPBT Personal Finance. The models I’ll be discussing have not yet been implemented on a large number of blogs, and thus the use of them is still pretty experimental. You might be able to try these at home, but for the love of God, please BE CAREFUL.
Most frequenters of the mommyblogosphere are familiar by now with Momversation, the video blogging series that features well-known mommy bloggers in a regular discussion of mommy-related topics. Sponsored by Target, Momversation is the brainchild of Rob Morhaim of Deca TV, who started from the premise that there were certain issues that came up repeatedly for mothers blogging on the internet, and that if you could somehow aggregate and combine those conversations in on central hub, then you could create a new kind of content that presented a multiplicity of different voices at once. Since Morhaim’s background was in television, it made sense to use video content as a means of facilitating that discussion, with the thought that the videos could appear on the sites of each of its participant bloggers, thereby providing promotion for the project as well as a “value-add” for the blogs of the panelists who participate in the project.
In terms of generating traffic for the Momversation website, this strategy appears to have worked. Though the exact web traffic to Momversation.com is not quantified, Momversation.com has an Alexa traffic ranking in the top 100,000 (currently at 43,899). It stands to reason that they have a decent number of page views per month, given that ranking and the fact that they have developed a reasonably active community and forums. But the fact that Momversation has embedded videos all over the web — including some heavily trafficked areas on the blogs of its member panelists — might serve to inflate those traffic ranks, since it seems that whenever an embedded video is loaded, this counts as a pageview on the main site.
I’m not big on video content, so I had to do some fishing around in order to understand the nitty gritty on Momversation’s video stats. At Mom 2.0, Rob Morhaim was asked about the reality of the video statistics for Momversation during a panel about using alternative forms of media in blogging. It seems that the video technology used for Momversation (as well as many other video sites) usually has some means of tracking views embedded in the player itself, but for some reason the Momversation numbers do not have these numbers readily available. To clear things up, Morhaim said that those embedded numbers are not used for Momversation because of its multi-seat promotion techniques — in short, that the numbers of views tracked by any one Momversation viewer would be inaccurate because it appears so many different places on the web, all at once. Morhaim did say that the Momversation oeuvre has easily topped twenty million views since its beginning in late 2008.
Twenty million views sounds like a lot to me, and it sounded like a lot to most of the people in the room at Mom 2.0. But as it turns out, twenty million views for a set of over two hundred videos spread out over a year and a half, while still respectable, is not as fantastic as it initially sounds. To give perspective, a video posted on a typical Dooce post (like one of her husband in the bath, say) can get anywhere from 10,000 to 50,000 views tracked on its host video site (Flickr, Vimeo, YouTube). Make two hundred of those videos, and you’ve already got four million views, with no post-production, soundtracks or other big name bloggers contributing to the conversation or pimping it out on their blogs.
Still, Momversation makes money, and presumably generates a decent return on investment for its long-term corporate sponsor, Target. DECA TV also sells ads on the main site. Opportunities to advertise with Momversation, according to the DECA TV site, include “product placement, title sponsorship, micro-sites and reskins, display and interactive media, newsletters, content licensing, and revenue shares.” It’s not clear to what degree that these methods have been deployed within Momversation itself, since DECA TV also has replicated the Momversation model in various other sectors of the blogosphere including the “properties” Parents Ask (Momversation, only with actual parenting experts, psychologists, and pediatricians), Project Lore (Momversation for Gamers), Smosh (Momversation for Teens), Good Bite (Momversation for Food Bloggers), and Dog & Pony (Momversation for Start-ups, Tech Gurus, and Entertainment people).
DECA’s website states that their company’s purpose is to locate “pre-existing online communities or ‘tribes’ along with ‘tribal leaders’ . . . people who have emerged from the online rabble to become recognized leading voices in their vertical space” and then put together “properties that have video at their core, but capitalize on all the publishing and interactive capabilities the web has to offer.” They put out a high quality product, and have a smart approach to creating unusual content for the mommy blogosphere, even if I’m still not convinced that video is the right medium through which to communicate with this particular market sector. There are a lot of questions about Momversation in the blogosphere, though, concerning the way Momversation is produced, how the panelists are chosen, what kind of compensation is involved, and — particularly with the recent launch of BlissTV — the viability of video blogging as a means of commercializing blogs. Here’s my stab at delving into the issue further, for what it’s worth.
Where Does Momversation Appear And How Much Does It Cost?
Momversation has its own website, but the peculiar level of its success is due to its exposure across a ton of different platforms, including the personal blogs of all the panel members, as well as various placements in Hearst publications and on the Oprah Winfrey Network. Momversation appears in the content column of the panelists’ blogs — which in some cases is very valuable web real estate — as well as in the sidebars of some of the blogs of panelists. It is a safe assumption that Dooce (who featured the Momversation video as a fixture in her sidebar for several months) would have been paid a fee specifically for that purpose, since that amount of space on Dooce.com would have been selling for as much as $15,000 per week at that time. Dooce’s contract would have to include the fee for her appearance as well as some kind of clause for the space on her blog, though it appears that Momversation has since removed its ad on Dooce’s site. By contrast, the space on Giyen Kim’s sidebar is probably not billed out at the same rate, and I don’t know if the appearance of Momversation there is by contract or just the free choice of the blogger.
Because nobody is talking at Momversation. Not about salaries, not about anything.
That’s right, I was tacky and asked about money. I do these things for you guys. Because that’s what we want to know — how much are they getting paid for this gig, right?
I wrote to all of the Momversation panelists to see if they could give me ballpark numbers for the salaries they get for participating in Momversation. Several panelists wrote back, but they all explained that they had signed what one person referred to as a “pretty air-tight confidentiality and nondisclosure clause” that prevented them from talking about the specifics of their contracts. This is not surprising, since the people behind Momversation are Hollywood types who are used to the sensitivities surrounding discrepancies in talent salaries. Jessica Gottleib, a current Momversation panelist, did confide in me that she doesn’t “work cheap or silly,” and that she’s “very happy with [her] deal with Momversation.” This sentiment was echoed by another panelist, who said she loved working with them (DECA TV).
They have covered their bases, because nobody is willing to talk, even people who don’t work for them regularly, which means they must be getting paid a shit ton to participate in this deal. Of course, I had figured they must be well compensated, and I had still hoped to get some kind of ballpark numbers, but to no avail. I do have reason to believe that there is a flat fee paid to the participants, either by month or by week, per contract, and that each panelist has a set number of required appearances in the videos. I’m not sure that these requirements are the same across contracts, though, and besides, I cannot substantiate these claims, despite my best efforts at getting some more information. Here’s what Rob Morhaim had to say on the matter of salaries yesterday:
I’m sure it’s no surprise that all compensation questions are completely confidential. I cannot even give you a ballpark. I can tell you that everyone has agreed to and lives up to the terms of the same talent agreement.
TOTALLY UNSUBSTANTIATED CONJECTURE: Putting that statement through the lens of my highly specialized and scientific measuring tool, I surmise that, not only is there a discrepancy in the salaries paid to Momversation panelists, but the discrepancy must needs be so large that even a hypothetical ballpark number would betray the egregiousness of it all, viz. it’s got to be a crazy range, like a few hundred bucks per month for the lowest paid to like several thousand or even tens of thousands per month for the highest. Because if not, a ballpark wouldn’t matter much, right? Of course, sometimes these deals are so crazy careful that they just don’t ever tell you anything unless you’re on a need-to-know basis. But in my mind, the lack of a ballpark is telling. I’m just saying. End of totally unsubstantiated conjecture.
Here’s what I can tell you about hypothetical revenues associated with Momversation, though. When the Momversation project initially launched, it was running ads across the entirety of the BlogHer Ad Network, and spots for Momversation appeared several times here on ABDPBT before I eventually opted out of the campaign (only because they did not offer an option for having the video play only on demand, and I cannot countenance auto-play video — particularly with sound — no matter how high the CPM, it’s just too annoying). The CPM for those Momversation ads on BlogHer Ads at that point was about $12, which is on the higher end of rates for CPM on BlogHer Ads. To be pimping out a site at that rate — blanketing the network in spots at the time, in fact, if I recall correctly — there has to be some serious venture capital involved. Since Momversation is still going strong after a year and a half, I would guess that all parties, corporate and bloggers, are happy with the deal as it stands now. And that’s also probably why it’s so hard to find out anything about the nature of their deals.
How Do You Get On Momversation?
Rob Morhaim, the producer of Momversation and the guy that Heather Armstrong refers to as “our Bosley,” is a smart guy, and if you want to be on Momversation, it appears that the best way of doing so is to impress yourself upon him in some manner. Initially, the panelists for Momversation were chosen in a variety of ways: first, the project’s sponsor, Target, submitted a list of its “wants” for bloggers. At Mom 2.0, Morhaim told me this list was based mostly on traffic, but that Target also had required that the panelists meet certain demographics. After lining up some of the ideal bloggers on Target’s list, Morhaim went out himself and “found the voices” who would fill the other slots.
Strangely enough, most of those voices seem to have been listed on the pages of the Federated Media Parenting Federation page. Of the original panel of Momversation bloggers, there are three bloggers who were not represented by Federated Media at the time of their inclusion in Momversation; one of whom was Daphne Brogden, who is involved in another DECA-affiliated endeavor of undisclosed specifics (her blog, Cool Mom, is listed as one of DECA’s “properties.”). Giyen Kim, of Bacon Is My Enemy, uses BlogHerAds, but was featured on Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop page for Mommy Bloggers at the time she was picked for Momversation and appeared on CNN.com several times for her weight loss video blogging, and this is presumably how she came to Morhaim’s attention.
The third non-Federated Media represented blogger is Rebecca Woolf, the inclusion of whom on the panel really doesn’t require explanation: she is a beloved blogger, a gifted writer, a glamour queen and a best-selling author, and much has been made of her ability to mix high fashion with stuff she finds at Target: my guess is that she was among the few bloggers on Target’s original wishlist of ideal bloggers for Momversation. Somebody else who was likely on that ideal list of bloggers is Ree Drummond of The Pioneer Woman, who confirmed that she declined the offer to participate in Momversation mostly due to the demands of her schedule at the time (she was trying to complete what would become her best-selling cookbook, The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Recipes from an Accidental Country Girl, Harper Collins, 2009), as well as some some uncertainty that the project would be the right fit for her.
The short answer to how you can get involved in Momversation is: you can’t. At least not for pay. Panelists are chosen by traffic and by their ability to meet demographics, and this appears unlikely to change. However, as more video experiments enter the blogosphere, there may be more opportunities to become part of this kind of gig, presuming this method of monetization is really generating the return on investment that is suggested by the scant statistics available for analysis.
How Much Control Does Target Have?
One of the big questions with Momversation has been how the various bloggers were chosen, and to what degree Target, the (seemingly permanent) sponsor of Momversation influenced these choices. I asked Rob Morhaim about the initial choice of bloggers for Momversation (see panelist roster and updates here), and he told me that Target had some bloggers in mind, and that these names had been generated based mostly on traffic numbers. In addition to their traffic-based wishlist, Target wanted to have certain demographics covered by the panelists, including different races and marital statuses. At Mom 2.0, I asked, if this “need to cover certain demographics” meant that they required certain specific races to be represented, and Morhaim said, “I would find a blog, and it wasn’t a highly trafficked-blog, but it represented Asian-Americans,” to which I interjected, “Or single mothers?” and he said, “Yes.”
Other than specifics of salaries, which nobody is giving me, the one thing I wanted to know about with Momversation was how much input Target had over the choice of discussion topics. This is mostly because the inclusion of Momversation as a blogging award contender in this year’s Bloggies seemed strange to me, even if various participants have claimed that yes — Momversation is a blog, rather than a commercial for Target, and no — Target does not have editorial control over it. So I asked Morhaim about the role of Target in the choice of bloggers and content, and because our conversation became so difficult to splice into quotes that fit standard conventions of English usage, I’m just going to put a transcript of it here and you can draw your own conclusions:
Anna: “But did [Target] ever go around to the individual blogs, and look at content, and then say, ‘We don’t want this person, because of XYZ, because they use bad language or something?”
Morhaim: “No. Never.”
Anna: “So, what is [Target's] relationship to the content of Momversation, then?”
Morhaim: “They’ve been wonderful.” [Coupled with emphatic nodding.]
Anna: “Yes, but do they give you topics? Or do topics have to be run by them for approval first?”
Morhaim: “They’ve been wonderful.”
Anna: “Are there certain topics that they won’t let you do?”
Morhaim: “Well, there have been times when we’ve gone to them and have said, ‘How about we do a topic on holiday shopping, but not holiday shopping at Target? Just shopping in general,’ and they’ll say ‘Yes.’”
Now, before you go saying that he didn’t answer my question there, reflect on the fact that he DID kind of answer it, because the fact that they went to Target with a topic at all, in any event, suggests that he is in the practice of going to Target to get a topic OK’d. See what I did there? There’s no way of knowing if the topics are micromanaged by Target on a regular basis, but there is a suggestion here that there may be some degree of editorial control over content made by a corporate entity, rather than the topics being an organic result of all these dynamic moms just chatting it up.
Conclusions: I Don’t Really Have Any Yet
The article I wanted to write about Momversation was going to tell you exactly how much people are being paid to participate, how much revenue it generates for the parent company, and how Target feels about its experience with the project. But my friends, I have failed in this. So the only question remaining for me is: how do you guys feel about Momversation? Do you think it works in our community? I have my own thoughts, but I think a more valuable way of discussing this method of monetiziation is to try to explore its efficacy in this market through the comment section here. I haven’t bought stuff more often at Target as a result of Momversation, personally — I already bought a ton of stuff there to begin with, for one thing, and also, I don’t think I’ve ever watched a Momversation video from start to finish myself (except the one played at the panel at Mom 2.0) because personally, I don’t have any patience for video when I’m reading blogs. I like to read blogs, and I cannot stand the extra noise created by a video. When I want to watch TV, I watch TV. When I want to read blogs, I read blogs. Am I alone in this? What do you guys think?
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