[Alex3917]

I completely agree with your solution. This is what I wrote on my blog in 2005:

"...Then charge an additional five dollars per month. Of those five dollars, keep one dollar for the company and distribute the remaining four dollars to content providers like a pie. For example, if a user subscribes to four websites, then each of those websites gets a dollar per month. Or if that same user subscribes to eight websites, then each gets fifty cents per month. The genius of this is that it not only does it give content providers a good reason to implement the system, but it gives them an incentive to turn their customers into your customers. In short, the promotion takes care of itself."

I remember posting here telling Tipjoy to do this as well, but I guess they never took me up on it.

Anyway the only way to push something like this through isn't by having a really well-written founder's blog (although that is critical), it's by being willing to sit down and have 10,000 coffee meetings with the bloggers and newspaper owners to get to know them in person. Right now I am creating a platform (c.f. swagapalooza.com) to introduce the world's most-followed bloggers to new and interesting products, if you decide to go ahead and build this then I'll let you use the platform to help make your system the de facto standard.

[danielfranz]

Sounds like a good plan! My experience tells me that you have to be very careful when mixing bloggers and journalists from publishing companies (if that's what you intend to do). A lot of journalists perceive bloggers as a threat. Although that seems naive I think it's a normal reaction.

In my view it's necessary to involve bloggers but I don't think of them as journalists. They have other principles of investigating and sourcing and a different style of writing. Don't get me wrong, they're important and the fact that free blog providers enable potentially anyone out there to speak their minds on the big stage is a small revolution. Although not on one level with Gutenberg or the invention of the Net itself, like some say. But bloggers certainly are not the key to saving traditional journalism :)

[Alex3917]

"But bloggers certainly are not the key to saving traditional journalism."

I disagree. It will be far easier to convert bloggers than newspaper owners. And if newspaper owners see that bloggers are making more money than they are, they will eventually join as well.

The problem with starting with newspapers is that you'd need a critical mass, and that's very hard when you have 1,000+ players who each have a six-month sales cycle.

With bloggers, on the other hand, there are only a few key players and because each outfit is only a handful of people the sales cycle is only a few days at most. Unless I'm missing something, trying to sell to newspapers would be an enormous mistake.