Lingolook

It’s a fascinating moment for me.

On the one hand I’ve got a great job. Copywriting - and in particular freelance copywriting - has given me both the insight and education that lets me put my thoughts and feelings into words as well as the time, freedom and inclination to explore the outer reaches of web life.

At ‘work’ I have been busy drafting the story behind a few upcoming product launches with various success. I have been studying various ways of approaching the thorny subject of internal communication and recruitment. On top of all this, I have also been looking into creating the master content of a series of web strategies so that the text is both easy to translate and effective across 7 key European markets.

Not a dull moment then.

But just like anyone with time management problems, I have also been distracted by what has in the past been called “blind ambition” but now goes by the name of a “challenge”.

You see ever since I stumbled across the letters, S, E and O, I have been drawn to their power - the fact that words, chosen carefully, could actually change the geography and relevancy of search engine results.

Then there was what you could actually do once you had uncovered this secret. White Hat is my natural colour of choice, of course, but nevertheless these three letters have unquestionably permitted some fortunate few to exploit a system to the detriment of the many.

These letters also have a more sinister side: they alienate you from the “real” world around you. I recently brought to my multi-billion dollar client’s attention that there was precious little activity on their site from any of the search engines. I even went as far as to recommend reformulating their web strategies not only to generate new traffic streams from natural search engine results but also to build enough reputation throughout the entire site to change the formula used by my client when linking to its resellers.

I got a big bunch of nods, a number of smiles and quite a few “wow we had no idea”s but never heard from them again about it. Meanwhile my client continues to pour truckloads of money into individual projects which, because they are disjointed from the overall core principles and are void of any shared values, detract from the performance of the site as a whole.

Ugh!

Either SEO (and SEM for that matter) is still in its infancy outside the US or I’m starting to be earn a reputation as a lunatic.

Best thing is to start my own business and boy do I have a few ideas knocking around. Thing is even then when I talk to friends and neighbours about them, even some who have offered to invest, the “big picture”always remains a few feet out of reach, as if what I see happening across the world in blogs, media companies and other online industries is merely a figment of my imagination, or just part of a game I’m playing all by myself.

‘Slow world’ meets the ‘fast world’, as an Italian web specialist once said, is when those living in a world fed by mainstream media have to deal with the lightning fast reactions of those of us who have chosen a more democratic, if slightly more volatile, path online. It’s never a pretty site and we (fasties) always come out worse off.

The question of whether to continue or go back is a rhetorical one. However the answer opens up a whole new debate: Then what?

I have ordered the near future into challenges I have to face:

1. I want and need to master the art of RSS as I believe RSS technology is what’s needed to create the world’s most advanced e-learning platform.
2. I believe that niche communities and experience aggregators are the key to entrepreneurial success in a Web 2.0 world. Jeremy’s “No Money in Web Advertising” articles have been instrumental in this decision.
3. I believe strongly in a healthy relationship between paid content and free services. E-learning, for example, is an ideal platform to experiment with both.

Each of the above is a open project I’d like to see up and running by the end of the year and if there are any talented writers, teachers or programmers reading this, I could probably bring that forward quite some way.

Want to know why I got buzzed today. Because I read this, then watched it here.

Oh and Jeremy, if you’re reading, I’ll be in touch soon - or you will…

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Jeremy Wright’s response to allegations that there’s no money in advertising is seriously worthy of note for anyone planning on setting up an online media company (like me).

If for nothing else, it was a real eye-opener for relative newcomers, again like me, on the mechanisms used to generate income from similar projects.

Remember I’m the creative one. I’ve got the idea in my head and am working on ways to implement it, yet people with hands-on knowledge of revenue streams are way ahead of me in this field.

What was particularly interesting for me was the part where Jeremy wrote:

They (Jeremy Liew’s figures) don’t hold true if:

1. You do more than 25M AdSense impressions per month (you get a better cut, exclusive deals, etc).
2. You work with a boutique ad network (like Federated Media).
3. Are able to get some remnant inventory providers (which can go from 0.50-2$/unit CPM, giving you an RPM of 1-4$ with just 2 units per page).
4. You do any non-performance/metric advertising (like sponsorships).
5. You do text links.
6. You have any internal sales team at all (which’ll sell those 1$ units for 2-5$, giving you an RPM of 4-10$ on even the most generic traffic).

He went even further:

1. For generic traffic, expect a 3-5RPM. To get to 50M$/year in revenue would thus require 800 million pages per month.
2. For demographically specific stuff, expect an RPM of 12-15. You’d need about 300M pages per month.
3. Huge in-demand areas like cars and sports can net you an RPM of 40-50. You’d thus need about 100 million pages per month.

Now that’s not to say these numbers are easy. But a media company that balances the above 3 properly, does sponsorships, syndication deals, content licensing, text links, feed ads, etc could potentially achieve 50M$/year in revenue on about 200 million pages per month.

The mechanisms at work here make fascinating reading. Sponsorships, syndication deals, content licensing, text links and feed ads are all relatively new business areas for me, but seeing as the project I’m toying with would be used extensively by universities and international business groups, it should be one of the first things I look at.

But it isn’t. I’m the creative one, remember? I just put two and two together and came up with over a million subscribers.

Maybe I should just give Jeremy a call…

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