[jacques_chester]

My original motivating problem was: how do blogs I like make money?

Blogs that aren't about answering Oracle Obscure Platform 6.75a-R2 questions. Blogs that aren't about mesothelioma. Blogs that aren't "review" websites.

Honest, good old fashioned smart people writing thoughtful stuff.

Based on who I've talked to in areas of business and politics and the visible spread of ideas in Australian public intellectual life, the demographics for the blogs I directly host are amazing. Highly paid professionals all round. They're read in ministry offices and C-suites all over the country.

To scrape some of this high-quality audience $$ I'd need to adopt a very high touch advertising policy and use invasive user tracking to prove my demographics. I don't have time or the moral flexibility and neither do the bloggers.

Hence: how do the blogs I like make money?

(Answer right now is: at their dayjobs.)

The technology I've developed allows users to be tracked visiting participating websites without the websites being able to piggyback on my scheme to track users across multiple sites. It's resistant to the visit falsification attacks present in any standard tracking scheme.

Pointless without a business, of course. So watch this space, I suppose.

[chewxy]

Ever thought of advertorials? Advertorials + rev share would be a good idea had you not listed "moral flexibility" in your list of constraints.

I noticed you host John Quiggin. I used to read him a lot. This is how he would use his blog to make money: sell his books to his blog audience. Tyler Cowen, the guy behind Marginal Revolution used to have this trick where he would give you access to his private cooking blog if you bought his book. Some form of managed affiliate system would be my best guess.

Also, mesothelioma is soooo 2005. :P

[jacques_chester]

When I wrote my honours project (which was the first version of the tech I developed) I mentioned merchandising; it's pretty hit-driven though.

I personally make money on affiliate links to Amazon. By which I mean "I get a minute subsidy on my book habit".

Some of the bloggers make a few dollars on advertising, but the amount has steadily fallen because they aren't sufficiently narrowly focused to be worth finding a niche advertiser. And they aren't sufficiently widely read that a more general A/B brand-awareness advertiser would pay much over open-market CPM.

[chewxy]

You seem to have found the problem by yourself. IMO this would be the trough of sorrow[0] for any startup with advertising as a monetization plan - the growth but no growth phase.

In my blog post I mentioned that here there are basically two paths to go - both of which you have identified. If you want to stick with advertising, choose one?

[0]http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/03/the-startup-curve.html

[jacques_chester]

I am choosing to invent a new model, actually :)

[chewxy]

pray share (microsubscription has been done before as you said). How would you do it?

[jacques_chester]

Email me.

Edit: "invent a new model" is hubristic code for "independently invent a new model that actually can be analogised to some pre-internet models".