Blogs on Kindle a Failure or Just Overpriced?

Piers Fawkes of PSFK has not been a fan of the Kindle and I can’t blame him.

Recently, their rather popular blog became available on the Kindle with a 14-day free trial and then the standard Kindle blog subscription rate of $1.99/month.  Here’s what happened:

During the first two week period of sales we added a button advertising the service to all our newsletters, website pages and RSS feeds – approximately 250,000 impressions. As some of you may remember, I penned the opinion piece ‘Kindle’s Not Working‘ last week and these sales figures surely prove statistically that Amazon’s technology is a failure when it comes to blog publishing and readership. It’s crazy to read that the tech media continues to be deluded about Kindle’s success when even with a 14 day free trial and massive awareness among our readership we can’t muster more than one $1.99 a month subscription.    LINK

Now, it isn’t really all that surprising that so few people decided to subscribe to the PSFK blog but I wonder if it has more to do with the $1.99/month pricetag combined Kindle’s failure as a rich media device – and it is a failure with no pictures, no video, etc.

Think about it.  If you are anything like me, you read a fair number of blogs.  In fact, I would say that I currently have over 50 blogs subscribed to in my GoogleReader.  If I wanted to even come close to replicating that experience on the Kindle it would cost me around $100/month or $1200/year just to read blogs that completely free online or via my iPhone.  On top of that, the Kindle is a completely inferior blog reader due to the aforementioned lack of rich media capabilities (or color, for that matter!).

So, while I am sad to hear that the Kindle will not be a revenue-generator for blogs, I think it was foolish for anyone to think otherwise given the overall picture.

Starburst Helps Bloggers Sell Out

Starbursts has put together a multi-tiered web marketing plan.  In addition to a redesigned website (ho-hum) and a YouTube channel nobody seems to be watching (top-viewed spot has less than 1,000 views), the candy-makers have decided to buy themselves some bloggers:

“The candy company has also partnered with video bloggers David Choi, DavidJr, Katers17 and Rhett & Link.

“We have engaged a series of leading bloggers who have established relationships with the millennials target that we pursuing,” said John McCarus, VP and group director of brand content at Digitas/The Third Act.

“What we found out about them is that the way they fit in is by standing out,” Stanley said of the millennials demographic. “They want to share excessively themselves and this is fueled by technology,” he added.

The video bloggers communicate what the Starburst brand stands for in their own styles, McCarus explained. For example, Katers17 created a video talking about her “juiciest” moment, which consisted of a messy tumble into a strawberry patch. “Through all those creative interpretations we’re going to be communicating the whole value and power of sharing across the Web,” he added.” (via)

Gotta hand it to Starbursts.  Makes a lot more sense to use existing voices to shill for them than to try and develop their own original sales force.

Doesn’t seem like any of the bloggers are worried about reader blow-back against taking money for sponsored posts.

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Self-Employed revolution

The internet is the backbone for a revolution in self-employment opportunities.  While many have tried and failed in this pursuit, many have also tried and succeeded.  There doesn’t seem to be a magic formula for success, but one key element of many plans is tapping into the many niche communities living on the web.

Caroline Middlebrook has written a book exploring one such way to do this:

“One of the most common ways to make money on the Internet today is to pick a popular topic and put together a small website consisting of articles related to that topic and monetize the site with ads. The traffic comes from search engines and once the site is setup, it just runs on auto-pilot. ”

She is providing a free download of her book and uses WordPress (a free software package) as the foundation of her technique.  Very interesting reading.