The Printed Blog Pulls Plug

I don't think it was ever a question of "Will he make money?" That was a given, and I'll explain why I think that was in a bit. The explicit problem here is that he couldn't get anyone to give him a quarter of a million dollars in the hope of turning that quarter of a million dollars into a billion dollars. And unfortunately, it sounds like he approached the business in such a way that he needed to raise a ton of money in order to keep it going, instead of staying small and being able to pay for it himself or through his advertising profits.

Here's why he'd be able to make money: You don't have to be honest with your print advertisers like you do online.

If you sell someone an online ad, they can track impressions, clicks, everything. They receive a full accounting of the product you sold them. That's great for the advertiser, bad for the publisher.

If you sell someone a print ad, they have no clue how many people see it, read it, act specifically on it.

So you have no metrics. That's horrible for the advertiser and great for the publisher.

Meanwhile, the way print media has evolved, the metrics that the advertisers DO get come FROM the publisher, and are inevitably false. When I was on the high school paper, my adviser told me that newspapers take the number of papers sold and multiply it by three to calculate their circulation based on the idea that every paper is passed around to 3 people.

So if this Printed Blog guy was handing out 4,000 papers at a CTA stop. He could use traditional newspaper smoke and mirrors to tell advertisers that 12,000 people are seeing their ad and charge them a rate based on that.

Now, we all know that 12,000 people aren't seeing that ad. In fact, I bet less than 4,000 people are seeing that ad. Maybe 400? 200? Who knows.

But because he's offering a print product, while he loses cool points, interactivity, and all sorts of other stuff, he gains the time-tested ability to fleece his advertisers using skewed metrics in the way that newspapers and magazines have been doing for decades.

So he makes money. He can charge $100 for an ad that would be worth only $10 online.

AS long as advertisers are gullible to the distortions of print advertising marketing, there's an opportunity for people to make money in print. Who knows what the heck the RedEye people tell their advertisers. I suspect it's a bunch of crap. How would the advertisers know what's really happening with their ad?

I do not know the Printed Blog guy. Never met him and only visited their site a few times, but that's always been my assumption. I figured the guy met a newspaper guy at a conference and learned about how they trump up fake stats for print ad sales because there's no way to double check them. He then got an idea to exploit that information by combining it with bloggers' willingness to give away their work for free in order for exposure.

It's actually a pretty clever idea. As he says, if he'd stayed small and grown organically, it may have worked.

That's not a shot at us. We've not received a lick of funding from anyone other than our own readers and members.

I think that's a fair shot in general, however, and I applaud Josh for pointing out the truth that most of the "local sites" out there are hobby sites in that they're not being run with a laser-aim at making money. If your goal isn't to make money, but to make a point or have fun or something else, you're not running a business. That's a totally valid thing to work on, but it's not a business.

I met Josh once, shortly before he launched their first issue, we had a really nice lunch together as he told me about his vision for the Printed Blog and I talked about the Citizen. Very early in my explanation he asked me if I was coming at this from a journalism perspective or a business perspective, a question that threw me a bit.

That was one of a handful of moments from last winter that helped me get out of the "I want to tell stories" mindset and into the "I want to make money, so I can REALLY tell stories" mindset. So I have him to thank, in part, for helping me focus in on creating online advertising products and focusing in on providing features and services that can grow and be useful and lucrative in the end.

As he says in these posts, he'll be on to the next thing soon enough. In fact, if you follow his Twitter feed, you'll see he's already working on his next projects.

See my comment below. Idea made a lot of sense, just not editorial sense.

Hi, Urbanophile!

1. I agree the name was a real problem. It just wasn't a brand, which is what they needed.

2. Interesting about the paper format. Would you have gone even smaller than a standard tabloid?

3. The lack of local content did seem puzzling. Why segment it out by region if there was nothing unique to that region in it?

4. Flavorpill may have turned them down, realizing it would be bad for business to let someone else do their job for them.

I agree that positionining was a big problem. I think trying to hit a bunch of cities at once was also what did them in though.

Did you see any hits on your blog from them running an article from it? How did they approach you and why did you consent to let them distribute your work?