Yepic, Wikipedia, and the Bloggosphere

Do you use Wikipedia? Do you read blogs?

Let's compare those two:

Wikipedia currently has 1.4MM articles in English alone and, per Alexa, is the 9th most popular website in the world.

Given that 6 of the sites that are more popular are either search engines or social networks, Wikipedia is actually 2nd only to You-Tube as the most popular content-based website in the world. I would guess that more than 50 percent of the time I'm searching Google, I end up at Wikipedia. And you're probably familiar with scientific studies that have been done showing Wikipedia to be as accurate as Encylopedia Brittanica.

This is truly astonishing given the fact that two years ago no one even knew Wikipedia existed. Look at the graph below that shows how Wikipedia (the blue line) has quietly exploded and overtaken sites like eBay, Amazon, and About.com.


The marvel of Wikipedia only expands when you discover how many employees the company has. 10. That's right. Just 10.

So who's writing all this amazing content? Perhaps you, like me, understood that Wikipedia was authored by volunteers. The basic premise of their "wiki" software is that everyone can create new content and everyone can edit everyone else's content. The millions of articles that have sprung up in dozens of languages created for me a vision of hundreds of thousands--perhaps even millions--of authors all working in this kind of controlled chaos that was producing these golden nuggets of information.

But this is not the case. The Wikipedia author community is surprisingly small. Spend 10 minutes reviewing these charts and you'll discover the following:

• There are less than 200,000 people who have ever edited Wikipedia 10 times or more.
• There are less than 50,000 people who edit Wikipedia 5 times a month.
• There are less than 5,000 people who edit Wikipedia 100 times a month (which is about 3 times a day).

Take a minute to think about this. From my vantage point, the people who are editing 100 times a month are really the stewards of Wikipedia. They are the ones who've created most of the content, done most of the research, refined most of the offering. The other contributors no doubt impact the overall offering of Wikipedia, but it's this core group of less than 5,000 that have really given us the tremendous website we all use today.

It's a testament to just how much value a focused group of people can create. And they did it all for free.

Now let's take a look at another group that's also producing tons of content: Bloggers.

Technorati.com is a service that tracks and ranks blogs. Today they're tracking 102.8 million blogs. 18 months ago they were tracking 34 million. Take a look at this chart from April 2006. I've had a hard time finding something more current.


34 million blogs 18 months ago. 108 million blogs today. And Technorati says the bloggosphere is going to just keep on growing. Many are already talking about the day when there are more than 1 billion blogs.

Pew Internet published a report a year ago analyzing all this blog activity in the United States. Of 12 million American bloggers at the time (undoubtedly many more now), fully 68 percent said they blogged to share practical skills and knowledge with other people. 2 million of them said they wanted to find a way to make money with their content.

Technorati ranks the blogs in the bloggosphere, and one of the more interesting lists they publish is the Technorati 100, which chronicles the top 100 most popular blogs on the Internet.

Just for kicks, I thought I'd compare the top 4 blogs to Wikipedia in terms of traffic and popularity.


Just a couple of years ago, Wikipedia was generating similar traffic to some of these blogs. Since then things have changed quite a bit.

The Bloggosphere is also getting quite a bit of criticism in the press. A prominent journalist recently posed a compelling question about blogs: "What if what we're doing here is creating a ghetto of cheap content?"

So . . . Wikipedia becomes one of the world's most popular, beloved, and trusted websites in a couple of years with just a few thousand volunteers and 10 full-time employees, while the bloggosphere--with tens of millions of contributors and over 100 million blogs--has become a bloated stack of hay within which people struggle to find the occasional needle.

What accounts for this gigantic disparity? Surely the 5000 or so Wikipedians creating most of the content aren't smarter than everyone in the Bloggosphere. Surely they don't have more collective time. And surely the bloggers in the Bloggosphere don't have less of an interest in sharing what they know, contributing their time, etc.

I think the disparity is primarily a function of synergy (or lack thereof, in the case of bloggers).

Steven Covey talks about synergy in his book "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People." He calls it a law of nature: when plants are planted next to one another, their roots co-mingle to improve the quality of the soil; draft horses can individually pull 10,000 or so lbs., but if you put two of them together they can pull 40,000 lbs. or more. When it comes to synergy, the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts. 2+2 doesn't equal 4, it equals 5 or more.

Wikipedia's 5,000 users have come together organically (they found one another, invited one another into the site and thereby grew the community one person at a time) and become one of the most inspiring examples of synergy that we have in modern history.

The Bloggosphere is just the opposite. Millions and millions of individuals all fighting for attention, trying desperately to shout louder than everyone else.

The one produces the world's best content-based website. The other produces a "ghetto of cheap content."

So . . . what does this have to do with Yepic?

Wikipedia does very well when it comes to the type of information you'd look for in an encyclopedia. It does NOT do well when it comes to practical types of knowledge with a "How-To" flavor.

Interestingly, many blogs attempt to create this kind of "How To" content on every conceivable subject. But the content they create just isn't up to par with the expectations of those who search Google every day, looking for specific information on subject X or Y.

Why is this? There are probably many reasons, but I ultimately believe the problem with this type of content on the web today is rooted in a lack of good old fashioned capitalism. I created Yepic to address this problem.

I've written about this quite a bit in previous posts, and I'll write more in the future. But the short of it goes like this:

If I want to know about changing oil leaks on my 1996 Jaguar XJS (which I got for a steal on a local lot here in Utah), who's going to do a better job producing that info for me? Someone writing about it recreationally on a Thursday night, mainly as a hobby, or someone who's competing for my money in a system that clearly illustrates how much other authors and consumers value his content?

I'm convinced it's the latter. And if you are, too, then I hope you'll join the Yepic community, work with other Yepic authors, and help us create the web's next great offering: Yepic.com . . . the site people turn to first when they need any kind of practical how-to content on the web.

Getting Started on Yepic

I've created a Yepic article that helps you get started on the site. I've set it up for open collaboration, so please feel free to jump in and add content, make improvements, etc. Come on over and take a look!

Why Paying For Information Makes Sense

I think we might rename the Synopsis field of the article summary page to something like "Why Buying My Article is Better Than Searching for this Information."

We've been on a fund raising tour for the last couple of weeks and at a recent meeting with some angel investors, one guy fired up Google and asked us "Why would I pay for content when I can find several million hits on any given topic for free?"

That's a great question, one I think every Yepic author should think through thoroughly before pricing an article. I know there's value in UGC . . . I often discover more value in UGC than content I regularly and happily pay for. And a fresh new batch of market research from eBay confirms that people are buying UGC by the millions each month. But that doesn't mean it's easy to be a UGC entrepreneur. It would be a mistake to interpret the eBay data as evidence that it's simple to sell people your thoughts on a subject. People will need some convincing before they'll be willing to plunk down any money at all for some content, much less content they think they might be able to get free elsewhere.

What follows are my suggestions on how to answer this question.

Why Buying My Article is Better Than Searching for This Information

First, I think every Yepic article should be fully aware of and incorporate as much as possible of what I call the G20, which stands for the Google 20. What can you find on Google after conducting 20 minutes of search on your chosen topic? Generally speaking, if the jist of what you've written is readily available with search, you shouldn't be posting it on Yepic. You need to provide much more than that. I think it's a great idea to begin your article with a summary of what you found doing 20 minutes of Google search. Or 2 hours. The more you can convince your prospect that they're not going to quickly find what you've written anywhere else, the better a shot you have at getting them to buy.

The G20 is also a useful exercise in that it gives you some insight into the major trends that exist within your topic. I researched Thanksgiving for a few hours, for example, and found that almost everything in the first 3 pages of Google results had to do with Thanksgiving history, recipes and other food how-to, and/or arts and crafts. If I were to create a "Best of the Web" Yepic article on Thanksgiving, one that collated all of the best recipes and how-to (including instructional videos and podcasts), the best historical data, and the best arts and crafts for the season, and if I were to pitch my prospect on the fact that spending $2 on my article would be much more productive than spending 3 hours Googling (something I've already done for them), particularly if they're looking for info on any one of the 3 big trends . . . now we're starting to approach content someone will pay for. Considering the fact that "Thanksgiving" was the most searched-for term on Google (source: Zeitgeist) for the two weeks preceding the holiday, such an article might have done very well. I've always thought one of the best Yepic applications would be a series of articles that incorporates the Best of the Web for any of Google's Zeitgeist topics.

On a more theoretical note, I'd like to speak more directly to that investor's question:

A search for "How to" on eBay reveals thousands and thousands of UGC titles selling for under $10. Subjects range from "how to mix water colors" to "how to tame a wild boar." We have a friend who's wife used to sell baby bracelets on eBay and had a pretty loyal following, and her consumers quickly snatched up a 4-page "How to make a baby-bracelet" PDF she put together for the do-it-yourself crowd. And recent research we've conducted using eBay's new Marketplace Research tool shows that millions of dollars worth of these types of articles sell every month. There are several other sites where people can sell PDFs and eBooks, too. These models aren't new. Many of them sprung up when the Internet first became popular, and this content sells in spite of the fact that there is free information on the topic that's readily available with a little searching elbow-grease. They're full of pain for both buyers and sellers--a pain we're seeking address with Yepic--but they do constitute proof positive that there is existing demand and supply for paid UGC.
So why do people pay?
I've addressed this in another post, but the short answer is I think most of the free information on the web that I'm really interested in was crafted for a different purpose than satisfying my need for information. That purpose? The author's recreation. Most people contribute to the web recreationally. It's fun to do on a Thursday night when you have a couple of hours. This ultimately means that any overlap between their need for recreation and my need for information is most likely accidental. Hence the web is filling up faster than ever before--more than 12,000 new blogs per minute--and yet I still struggle to find out the best way to take a Western Carribean cruise.

Why is this recreational model the most prevalent one on the Internet today? Well, is sure isn't because people aren't interested in making money. Pew Internet's recent survey on bloggers showed that fully 2 million of them are interested in finding new ways to monetize their content. We think the reason recreational models are creating more content than paid models is simply because there hasn't been a marketplace suited to the creation, sale, and distribution of true Web 2.0 content. That's something we're seeking to remedy with Yepic.

The Pains of Creating and Selling Digital Content Today

eBay users are already buying and selling copious amounts of user-generated content. But consider the pain of this experience:
We developed this table to give us a framework for thinking about the problems we're really solving with Yepic. What do you think? Is there something missing?

Web 2.0 and the Changing Face of Digital Content

Someone recently asked me to define the term Web 2.0.

For starters, I really like Tim O'Reilly's definition of the term. Wikipedia's page is also good. Both note how Web 2.0 is less about something new and more about the fuller realization of the web's true potential. This realization, contents O'Reilly, gravitates around several core themes: Specifically:

1. The Web as platform.
2. Harnessing collective intelligence
3. Data is the next Intel Inside
4. End of the Software Release Cycle
5. Lightweight Programming Models

I should write a post on how Yepic is, in each of these respects, a Web 2.0 company. But in this post I want to focus on what O'Reilly calls "data" and what we call "digital content." To better illustrate, let me quote O'Reilly's article:

"Contrast, however, the position of Amazon.com. Like competitors such as Barnesandnoble.com, its original database came from ISBN registry provider R.R. Bowker. But unlike MapQuest, Amazon relentlessly enhanced the data, adding publisher-supplied data such as cover images, table of contents, index, and sample material. Even more importantly, they harnessed their users to annotate the data, such that after ten years, Amazon, not Bowker, is the primary source for bibliographic data on books, a reference source for scholars and librarians as well as consumers. Amazon also introduced their own proprietary identifier, the ASIN, which corresponds to the ISBN where one is present, and creates an equivalent namespace for products without one. Effectively, Amazon "embraced and extended" their data suppliers."

O'Reilly's primary argument here is that no company can create sustainable competitive advantage out of commoditized data. MapQuest became irrelevant because they leased and resold data that other businesses (Google Maps, for example) could also lease and resell. Amazon, on the other hand, has become an unquestioned authority in publishing because they took the ubiquitous ISBN registry and extended it with tons of user-contributed data.

O'Reilly's argument focuses on businesses that operate individual web-sites, but I think there's a parallel line of thought here that applies to individual purveyors of digital content (like people who compose and sell their own copyrighted content), as well. In Web 1.0 days, the content you created was fundamentally limited in terms of openness, richness, and accessibility. In terms of openness, it was very difficult to collaborate with others, and this meant your content couldn't benefit from the collective intelligence that's become a hallmark of Web 2.0. In terms of richness, you could have text and grapics, or video and audio, but it was difficult to easily incorporate all of those into one piece of content. In terms of accessibility, Web 1.0 content was anything but. You had to download, install additional software, email, burn to CD, or print, and then you had to deal with all the version issues that came with those distribution and consumption models. If the author made a change to the content, it was very difficult to get it to all the consumers.

Web 2.0 content has improved dramatically in each of these regards:

Openness: Whereas Web 1.0 content was fundamentally closed, Web 2.0 information is fundamentally open . . . to collaboration, contribution, review, updates, etc.

Richness: Whereas Web 1.0 content was fundamentally flat and lacked integration across different types of media, Web 2.0 content is fundamentally rich and seamlessly integrates text, graphics, images, video, audio, widgits, etc.

Accessibility: Whereas Web 1.0 content was difficult to access, particularly in update scenarios, Web 2.0 content is always current and just one click away.

In the same way that business models that rely on commoditized data find themselves under enormous competitive pressure that pushes them into a state of irrelevance, content entrepreneurs that fail to embrace these new content characteristics will also find themselves, and their content, fading into oblivion. Closed, flat, inaccessible content is a dying breed.

With that in mind, we created Yepic not just a platform for for-profit self-publication, but as a platform for for-profit self-publication of true Web 2.0 content.

Missionaries, Recreators, and Capitalists

We've spent some time thinking about who creates UGC on the web, and we've come up with the following 3 categorizations:

1. Missionaries. These are the very, very active UGC contributors who write for the sake of benefiting humanity. Their content shows up in blogs, Q&A sites, and wikis. Wikipedia has largely been a success due to approximately 2000 very, very active Wikipedians who've worked night and day to pull together the vast majority of the 1.4M articles we enjoy every day. They do it without pay, and they would probably find the idea of getting paid for their work kind of repugnant. These folks are wonderful, remarkable, and they create terrific content. We are the grateful recipients of their terrific work.

There's only two problems with this group: (1) There aren't enough of them. Missionaries have always been a distinct minority, and their work, while terrific, tends to be limited by the small numbers in their ranks. (2) They can only work on things they believe in. Writing textbooks for children in 3rd-world countries? Sure! Helping you figure out which vacation package is better? Don't count on it.

2. Recreators. The recreators write, well, recreationally. In our opinion, these folks constitute the majority of the writers creating more than 12,000 new blogs per minute (and growing), or answering most of the 160M questions that have showed up in Yahoo Answers over the last year. They find value in community or sharing practical know-how, but more than anything they find writing and interacting with others fun, relaxing, stimulating, etc. Blogs, forums, Q&A sites, and hang-out sites like Helium and Gather are all outlets that they enjoy using for a couple of hours per day or week.

These folks create terrific amounts of content on just about every subject, and it's fun to browse through their stuff. But there's a problem with this group, too. Their content creation is almost entirely untethered from any quantifiable demand. It's almost all push, no pull. It's more about their creative outlet than your need for information. This means that while it's likely that there are folks writing about the topic you're interested in on the web, it's not necessarily likely that they're addressing your particular questions.

The web's content has become so "push" oriented that we all find ourselves combing through information that wasn't designed for us--or for anyone else, really . . . it's usually created to give the author a creative, recreational outlet most of the time--trying to find the bits and pieces we really want and need. This is now the norm.

3. The Capitalists. These are folks that want our money. And, as usual, they'll provide a better product for it, too. Why? Because in free markets, they have to compete against other folks who want our money too, and that competition is always a good thing for the consumer. Interestingly, the web hasn't catered well to date to information capitalists. They have to use eBay or kludgy PDF or eBook downloads to sell their stuff.

Yepic has been designed to give the capitalists a place to create and hawk their digital wares in an open market.

Why We Decided to Make Our Beta Private

First, let us express our very sincere gratitude to the many wonderful users who joined our site since we launched our public beta on November 9th. You can still log in with the same username and password you obtained when you joined. If you're not a user and you're interested in joining our private beta, please fill out the application on the homepage and we'll get back to you shortly.

We launched our beta with the intention of gaining a small user community and learning from them as we simultaneously planned for our actual product launch in 2007. As we considered low-cost alternatives to getting the word out to recruit a few hundred users, we discovered PRWeb and decided to issue a press release. It cost a few hundred bucks. We sent it out on the afternoon of November 9th, and figured it would generate a few visits, mainly from press people who watched the wire. We fully expected to have to recruit our early users one-by-one, and this press release was an attempt to see if we could get any traction at all with people we didn't know.

You can imagine our surprise when the very next day Fast Company wrote about us. It was a major shock to run a vanity search on Google for Yepic and find a link to a publication we're huge fans of and read every day. It was a bigger shock to go to their homepage and find our name front and center. I'd just come home from a date with my wife and some friends and decided to see if the press release had had any effect. Wow! The next two weeks were eventful, to say the least. For starters, we got far more traffic than we had expected to get during our entire beta run (which we had planned to run for 6 months, or so). We also got blogged by a number of different bloggers and covered by a few other press outlets. Registrations, new articles, etc. all shot through the roof.

You'd think we'd be elated, right? We were, absolutely. Especially at the fact that the product actually stood up under the enormous spike in traffic we received. We also love the fact that so many people immediately get Yepic's business model and see it's potential. But we were also a little concerned, for a few reasons.

First, we're working on strategic partnerships for both content and extended functionality that will greatly enhance the experience of buying and selling user-generated content, and we've always viewed these partnerships and the content/functionality they bring with them as integral to the success of our launch. We started to get very concerned that people reading the coverage on Yepic would be inclined to think of our public beta offering as our best foot forward as opposed to an effort to gain some insight from a small user community. Our technology is only one leg of the stool: the other two are content and a strong author base, and those won't really appear in Yepic before next year.

We were also concerned that the attention we were receiving would give would-be competitors the opportunity to really dig in on our offering before we even had a chance to get behind it and give it the proper launch it deserves.

We hope you'll be understanding of our change in plans. Yepic is currently in discussions with lots of potential partners and everything you've seen till now and much, much more is on it's way in early 2007.

Keep coming back to our blog as we're now going to update much more frequently.

Will People Pay for User-Generated Content?

Will People Pay for User-Generated Content?

Whereas former attempts to define Yepic began with a discussion of why users would be willing to pay for UGC, we've now found information that lots of people already do, and in prolific quantities. Per a Market Research tool eBay recently released, more than 600 user-generated articles priced from $1-20 have sold in the last few hours. Oh, and that was just in the "self-employment" category, which is one of 5 sub-categories in the "How-to" category, which is one of 3 categories in the "Information Products" category, which is buried in the "Everything Else" category on eBay. These information products sell everywhere on the site. I found some on how to get Disney Fast Passes that would work all day without any wait periods over in the category that displays tickets to Disneyland.

The fascinating thing about these articles is that they aren't masterpieces that have been collectively massaged by dozens of very, very active Wikipedians . . . they're rather ordinary pieces of content with titles like "Get ex girlfriend/boyfriend back - REVERSE BREAKUP NOW." That one was written by lucbecks7, who has an average 1-star rating from just 39 users. He sold his article today at approximately 1:44 p.m. MST for $8.97.

Fascinating, huh? What's more fascinating is that whoever bought Luc's article--which required, per Luc's pitch, the download of an eBook file from a secure site . . . an eBook which requires a reader, which the consumer might also have to download and install--could have run a search on Google for terms like "REVERSE BREAKUP NOW" and "get your ex back" and found these sites (1, 2, 3, 4, 5; there were many more, as you might imagine) in less than 5 minutes.

Why didn't they? I'm not sure. Perhaps they did. This much we do know: They were willing to pay a guy named Luc with mediocre eBay seller ratings almost $10 for his thoughts on the subject.

Why? Boy, now that's a tricky question that I need to work on in another post. Why do we ever buy anything the way we do? And just how much time and effort are we really willing to put into pre-purchase homework when it comes to $10? $5? $1? I mean, if the shoe fits . . .

A friend of mine spent all of 5 minutes searching for Easy-Bake oven recipes on the Internet, and when he found an eBay article for $3, he whipped out his credit card and bought it. "I didn't give it a moment's thought," he said. I did some searching on Yahoo Answers and found what appeared to be several legitimate recipes for Easy Bake ovens, and they were free. My friend is a professional blogger and a computer programmer with a graduate degree in computer programming from the University of Chicago. He's very technical and savvy on search and other technologies. Why didn't he keep searching? Why did he pay?

The answer deserves more thorough consideration, but I suppose the big factors here are low-cost convenience, saved time, and greater relevance and specificity. The information we want right when we want it for a reasonable price is really a good deal for most people. Sure, there are folks who find it unthinkable to spend money for something they can get with a little elbow grease. These folks probably also change their own oil and wash their own cars. But folks like me find the exchange of cash for right-now service more than worth it in most cases, and we often find that the pros who provide the service we've paid for did a much better job than we would have on our own.

But there's much more at play here than just avoiding the sizable "search tax," I think. Paid articles are very likely better when it comes to relevancy and value. Why? I think it's pretty simple: when I'm creating content recreationally--this is the way MOST of the UGC on the web is created, click here to read more on that subject--here's what I'm not doing: thinking about exactly what you want to know. What makes me do that? Competition for your $$, that's what.

The point is, Yepic doesn't just make sense because current Info Capitalists have a rough go of it selling stuff on the web today (click here to read more about that); Yepic makes sense because an info marketplace is going to dramatically improve the quality of information products on the web today!

Yepic Gets Mentioned By Fast Company

Read the Fast Company blog post here.

Yepic Allows Bloggers to Sell Premium Content

There are many ways for bloggers to monetize content. Bloggers can make money by offering advertising on their site, or they can use their blog as a launch pad for their career. Now, a new service, Yepic, enables bloggers to earn money by selling their content directly to readers.

Yepic is a marketplace which allows writers to offer their articles for sale. Writers set the price for which they will sell their material. Right now, many articles on the service are free and the top per article fee appears to be $6.50. Articles on offer include "How to get into a top business school," "Writing JavaScript games using AJAX," and "Where to eat in Utah."

Yepic allows writers to embed images, video, and audio in their content. According to the Cedar Hills, Utah-based company's press release, Yepic will give content-creators "as much as 75% of the article price each time an article sells."

But will people really pay for content? My first impulse is to say "No Way!" The whole beauty of the Internet is its oodles of content--created by both amateurs and professionals--that is available for free.

On the other hand, the web is vast. Sometimes a lot of surfing is required to find out exactly what you want to know. Yepic offers a forum where potential content-consumers can post a request for content, designating "what I want to know and why" and who would be the "ideal author." A current content request is for an article about how to make the most of your Caribbean cruise. The ideal author is:

"Ideally someone who's been on a few cruises, preferably Royal Carribean ones to the destinations we're hitting. I'm not a penny-pincher, so if you are, please don't write the article."

If I was feeling lazy, or under time pressure, it might be worth $1 to me to have someone else compile information for me on my topic of interest--if there was no free clearinghouse for the information. Or, if I felt confident an author had expertise or a unique perspective that I could not find elsewhere online for free, I might pay for their content.

But, the diversity and enormity of the web makes it unlikely, for me, that a service like Yepic would have any content I wanted that I couldn't find elsewhere.

At a few dollars a pop, Yepic articles are cheaper than a book and certainly cheaper than an online course. If Yelp's content is comparable quality to a book or course, Yepic might have a successful business model. Otherwise, I'm skeptical.

What do you think of Yepic's business model? Do you think bloggers have a well of premium content for which people will pay? Would you use such a service as a consumer? As a content-producer?

Posted by Leslie Taylor at November 10, 2006 5:38 PM | Category: internet + web | 1 Comment

Problogger and New Learnings About What to Sell on Yepic

This last week I discovered www.problogger.net, a site that ranks in the Technorati 100. For those of you who don't know, Techorati is a website that ranks blogs.

Problogger has a terrific post on how to pick a profitable blog topic, and I think the logic holds true for Yepic as well, with maybe a few slight alterations. For starters, Yepic's first authors will have to provide content that exceeds the standards of blog content, particularly in terms of specificity and expertise. Before you write a Yepic post and try to sell it, make sure you surf the bloggosphere looking for comparable data.

ProBlogger also had this article on how blogs make money online. I was happy to see him mention "digital assets," which he identified as eBooks, tele-conferences, etc. It's good to see bloggers recognizing the demand for deeper treatment of the subjects they discuss on their blogs, and Yepic is a great platform for that type of content distribution.

What Should I Write About on Yepic?

Ask yourself three questions before you start:

1. What are people searching for on the Internet? List your answers.
   
2. With your answers in hand, ask yourself "What info about these subjects would people actually pay for?"
3. Why should they trust me as an author?
   

What Are People Searching For?

Here are several tools that will help you take the pulse of the web, find out what people are searching for, about, etc.

Google's Zeitgeist will show you the most popular searches on Google.








Google Trends will show you who in the world is interested in a particular search term.

















Yahoo Answers is a terrific site where users ask questions and other users answer them for free. Generally speaking the information exchange is at a very conversational level and doesn't provide a very deep treatment of any given question, but you and get a very quick read on which subjects people are interested in at a given moment.











Google Answers is a site where users actually pay to have certain questions answered. Sometimes as much as $200! This is a great site to mine if you're looking for subjects people are interested in paying for.











I also recommend checking out Technorati's list of the web's most popular blogs. This can also give you a cross section of the information the most people are interested in.

What Info About These Subjects Would People Actually Pay For?

I've come up with 3 types that I think will actually fly on Yepic:

1. Assisted Search. The fact is that lots of people don't have time to dig around on the Internet for hours and hours looking for a piece of information, and this means that lots of the great content that's already out there never gets found by its intended audience. I recently read a quote, can't remember who wrote it, but it nailed the image of Yepic serving this particular need: Imagine Yepic acting as a giant horseshoe magnet waving over the entire web, pulling the proverbial needle out of a billion haystacks. Have you put the time and energy into finding all the best and most useful info on a particular subject? Pull your research together and sell it on Yepic!
2. Useful Information. How to, where to go, insider knowledge, etc. Many people head to the web to find this type of information and they're often overwhelmed by a deluge of information that's been put together by marketers and/or company's with something to sell. Why is the Zagat survey so successful? Because it's informed by the opinions of work-a-day folks who speak with authentic voices about their experiences at restaurants. I wrote an article about where to go to eat in Utah, for example. In putting together this type of information, use your own needs as a guide. What kind of questions do you have that you haven't been able to find good answers for yet? It's likely that many other people are having the same problem. Do the work, put together a good piece of information, and list it for sale on Yepic. Here's a tip: price your articles as free until you get a decent sized audience that's consuming your information.
3. Content generated by more than one person. This content could fit topically into either of the categories above. The defining characteristic is that the content is developed by more than one person, and therefore benefits from more than one perspective. Sites like Wikipedia have shown that this "network effect" tends to produce information that's much more interesting and has higher degrees of quality and value. The Yepic platform has a collaboration harness built right in so you can benefit from the contributions of other users.

Why Should They Trust Me As An Author?

If you don't already have one, you'll need to work to build your audience at Yepic. Don't be surprised if you write something and no one buys it at first. People don't know who you are and aren't certain whether or not what you've written is worth reading, much less buying. You need to develop trust with readers before they'll start to read your stuff consistently.

Here are several tips on how to develop your audience:

1. Write good stuff and write it well. This single factor is probably more important than any other.
   
2. Publish often. Several bloggers have found that their traffic goes up when they publish more often and it drops substantially when they publish less frequently. Think of it like watering a plant . . . do it daily and the plant will grow.
   
3. Use your Author Profile. Take the time to write a great piece about yourself and include some photos. Your author profile also lists all of your articles and lets users buy them right then and there.
   
4. Use your network. We're going to be building several features around the user network.
   
5. Make articles you like your "favorites" using the "favorite articles" feature. What goes around comes around, and other authors will promote you if you help promote them.
6. Continually keep your audience in mind. As time passes, you'll become known for certain types of information and people will start to view you as something of a credible expert. Remember this group and make sure your information is fulfilling their needs.
7. USE YOUR SYNOPSIS. Every article has a synopsis, and this is the place where you can articulate all the reasons why a user should read your article. This information is also crawled by search engines. The more descriptive you are with your synopsis, the better. A very descriptive synopsis will drive your article summary up in the search engine ratings.
8. Pick a great article name, one that's highly descriptive. This also get's searched by Google. And here's a tip if you're writing a "How To" article: come up with several alternative titles and see how they come up in Google with quotes around them. If you can find a reasonable one that doesn't turn up any Google results, use it! My hope is that Yepic will fill up with how-to content that users can search on with Google and find nearly everytime without a bunch of other clutter. Click here for an example of what I mean.
9. Write shorter articles. Don't put together the 10 page diatribe. Cut the 10 page diatribe up into 5 individual articles that reference each other. People appreciate brevity, especially on the web.
   
10. List your Yepic Author profile page in your email signature. www.yepic.com/[username]. People will click on it.
    
11. Advertise your articles. You can use Google Adsense and Adwords (remember, you don't pay unless someone clicks on your ad) to drive traffic to the URLs of your article summaries. You can also use free advertising services like BlogSnob.
    
12. Link other Yepic articles to your own. As soon as another author sees you linking, she's very likely to link you right back.
    
13. Actively comment on and participate in the development of other Yepic author's articles.
    
14. Pitch your articles via email to family, friends, co-workers, etc. Also post links to your article in discussion forums, blogs, etc.
    

Hope this post was helpful.

Interested in learning more? Here's another article I sell for $1 that dives deeper.

How To Price Your Articles

In the early stages, I suggest you always price your articles as free. Remember, Yepic is a community that operates off trust, and that trust gets established as you gain favorable author and article ratings from other users. As a general rule, I don't think it's wise to start charging for articles until an article has received a few dozen positive reviews from users.

The Yepic Vision

We're constantly looking for better ways to define Yepic . . . what it is, what it enables. We've called it the content collaboration marketplace, and while that accurately describes the functional elements of the service, it doesn't really articulate what Yepic is all about. This article seeks to bring some clarity to the vision of our company.

One Platform, Many Applications

At it's core, Yepic is a technology platform that lets you do 5 very simple things:

1. Write articles.
2. Collaborate with other authors to improve articles.
3. Buy and sell articles.
4. Make requests for articles.
5. Collaborate with other users on requests for articles.

Simple, right? Write, collaborate, buy, sell, request, and collaborate again. About what? Now we get into the different applications of this simple, but very powerful platform for information development and distribution.

Level 2 Information

We were trying to come up with a way to describe the kind of information we'd like to see flourish on Yepic, and the one we've come up with--we know, we know, kind of a lofty goal--is what we call "Level 2."

Level 1 information is general info about a subject. The kind of stuff you'd find on Wikipedia, for example, or all over the web on billions of website. This is common knowledge, and it's generally available in abundant supply on the Internet. The quality varies substantially, although Wikipedia has really raised the bar in this respect. They, too, use a collaborative platform that allows users to contribute to, edit, and reformat the information on their site.

Level 2 information is information about a subject that has been adapted and formatted to a particular use. So if the Wikipedia page on The 2006 World Cup were Level 1 info, information about how to get tickets, where to stay, and how to have an excellent time at The World Cup would be Level 2.

Level 2 information is valuable information, stuff people are actually willing to pay to know. The closer it comes to the needs of its user, the more valuable it becomes. The more credible it is (and credibility can be attained either through the credentials of the author or by the number of people who validate and/or contribute to the information), the more valuable it becomes.

A friend of mine is moving to San Francisco and is facing the daunting task of figuring out where to live, whether to rent or buy, etc. He's researched Craigslist and has spent time reading up on San Franscisco in Wikipedia and a few other Internet portals. He's read as much Level 1 information as he can find, and he's still pretty frustrated. What would a good piece of Level 2 information look like for my friend?

Well, it would probably start with authentic experience. How about an article written collaboratively by 10 couples who've actually moved to San Francisco in the last year? How about 10 that have actually bought? How about 10 who've bought who make between $140-200K per year as a couple? How about 10 who've bought, make between $140-200K per year as a couple, and worked in San Jose? How about an article written by this group that identifies the top 10 pitfalls that can be easily avoided when moving to San Jose? Or an article that talks about the top 10 steps someone can take to survive financially in such buying conditions? Now we're starting to approach Level 2 information. I described the article to my friend and asked him how much he'd be willing to pay. "I dunno. Quite a bit, if the info was good."

If the info was good. Great point. How are we supposed to trust the content we find? That's why Yepic allows every user to rank everything they buy and every author who contributed to the article. How about one of the articles above that's been purchased by 238 users, 232 of which gave the article a highly favorable rating? Aha. Now my buddy's ready to spend some money.

You can take this approach with any subject. Drive the info down into Level 2 territory, adapt it and format it to a highly useful purpose, get some collaborators to improve your credibility, and price the article reasonably. If the content's good, if the title's enticing, if it looks and feels credible and useful, it will sell. And when it sells, people will give it good ratings. And that will convince other users to buy it too.

All the while, Yepic's management will be looking for ways to help the Internet community discover your content.

How will you make money? Yepic pretty much passes all the money from each sale directly to you. We just recoup some adminsitrative costs of hosting your info. We're even seriously contemplating waiving all those administrative fees in the beginning just to get the community off the ground.

More later . . .

A Terrific Fast Company Article on Pro-Am Networks

This article really captures the spirit of Yepic . . .

Amateur Revolution

From astronomy to computing, networks of amateurs are displacing the pros and spawning some of the greatest innovations.

From: Fast Company Magazine | Issue 87| October 2004 | Page 31 By: Charles Leadbeater Illustrations by: Istvan Banyai

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Rap inflects global popular culture from music to fashion. Linux poses a real threat to Microsoft. The Sims is among the most popular computer games ever.

These far-flung developments have all been driven by Pro-Ams -- committed, networked amateurs working to professional standards. Pro-Am workers, their networks and movements, will help reshape society in the next two decades.

The 20th century was marked by the rise of professionals in medicine, science, education, and politics. In one field after another, amateurs and their ramshackle organizations were driven out by people who knew what they were doing and had certificates to prove it. Now that historic shift seems to be reversing. Even as large corporations extend their reach, we're witnessing the flowering of Pro-Am, bottom-up self-organization.

Rap, for one, started as do-it-yourself music among lower-income black men from distressed urban neighborhoods, recorded by artists on inexpensive equipment and distributed on handmade tapes by local labels. Yet within two decades, rap has become the dominant popular music across the world. In league with Pro-Am music distribution made possible by Napster and Kazaa, it has turned the entire record industry on its head.

Linux is the product of mass participatory innovation among thousands of Pro-Am technologists. Many of them program commercial software for a living but work on Linux in their spare time because the spirit of collaborative problem solving appeals so powerfully. Likewise, according to one estimate, 90% of the content in The Sims is created by a Pro-Am sector of The Sims' playing community, a distributed, self-organizing group whose players are constantly training one another and innovating.

Passionate amateurs, empowered by technology and linked to one another, are reshaping business, politics, science, and culture.

In the developing world, Pro-Ams are solving a historical scarcity of professional resources. The Grameen Bank, founded by Muhammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi economics professor, trains barefoot bankers to deliver loans to people earning less than a dollar a day. This Pro-Am workforce makes it possible to cost-effectively administer 2.8 million loans worth more than $4 billion. Had Grameen relied on professionals, it would have reached a tiny proportion of the population.

The transformation of astronomy captures the dynamics that will change other fields. Amateurs laid the foundations for modern astronomy; Copernicus, who moved the sun to the center of the universe, was only a sometime astronomer. By the 20th century, though, the pendulum had swung decisively in favor of professionals for one simple reason: They had access to much bigger telescopes.

But in the past two decades, as science writer Timothy Ferris points out, three linked innovations have turned astronomy into an open-source, Pro-Am activity. First, there was the disruptive innovation. John Dobson, a onetime monk and full-time stargazer, built a crude but powerful telescope using inexpensive materials. Observers armed with their own Dobsonians can now invade deep space, previously the preserve of the professionals.

Then came the CCD, a highly light-sensitive chip that could record very faint starlight more accurately than a photograph. With Dobsonian telescopes and CCD sensors, the Earth acquired hundreds of thousands of new eyes, probing space and recording events that would have gone unnoticed by the few thousand professionals. The Internet multiplied the power of this distributed capacity for exploration: An amateur who has found something interesting can email the image to friends, colleagues, and professionals within minutes.

Astronomy used to be done in national "big science" research institutes. Now it is also done in global, Pro-Am, open-source collaboratives. There is still a huge gulf between amateur astronomers and theoretical astrophysicists. But the line between professional and Pro-Am astronomers has become fatally blurred. Much the same will happen in other fields.

Some professionals will find that unsettling; they will seek to defend their monopolies. The more enlightened will understand that the landscape is changing. Knowledge is widely distributed, not controlled in a few ivory towers. The most powerful organizations will enable professionals and amateurs to combine distributed know-how to solve complex problems.

Pro-Am activity will continue to expand. Longer healthy life spans will allow people in their forties and fifties to start taking up Pro-Am activities as second careers. Rising participation in education will give people skills to pursue those activities. New media and technology enable Pro-Ams to organize.

Pro-Ams could fuel mass participation in formal politics and in social entrepreneurship. They will play important economic roles as coproducers of services and sources of ideas. Democracy will be livelier, innovation more vibrant, social capital stronger, and individual well-being more securely grounded. After a century in decline, amateurs will rise again. And they will change the world.

Charles Leadbeater's report "The Pro-Am Revolution" is available on the Web (http://www.demos.co.uk/).

Richard's Yepic Story

Hi Everybody:

Great to be here, posting this first entry on our new Yepic blog. We set this up to keep you informed on our progress and give you more information about Yepic and our company vision.

So What Is Yepic, Anyway?

Wow. That's a fun story, and I bet Corey's version will differ substantially from mine. Here's how I came to where we are now:

Last year I heard Tim O'Reilly speak about Web 2.0 and related concepts at a conference I'd attended. In particular, he focused on wikis and how they were transforming the way information is created and shared on the Internet. I'd discovered Wikipedia (also click here for a great description of the site) shortly before that presentation, and although I'd already developed a serious appreciation for the quality of the information found there, I had no idea how it was being created. The revelation of the user-contribution system sort of hit me like a punch in the face. I was stunned momentarily: was it possible that an ungoverned, self-organized group of people could create such amazing material, without any of the normal incentives that typically drive us to produce stuff?

O'Reilly spoke at length about how users--lots and lots of users--add value, quality, authenticity, breadth, depth, accuracy . . . thereby creating a product that often exceeds professional standards. I took the concept back to work with me and started a wiki for my department. Within 8 months it had replaced all other forms of documentation we typically used and was getting adopted by several other departments. We found the collaborative platform of the wiki so much more easy to work with, and so much more optimized towards getting us to the PRECISE piece of information we were looking for in a given scenario.

One day I was chatting with a friend and I said, "I wonder if the wiki platform could be used for sellable information? You know, like the kind of stuff people will pay money for."

My first idea was to create a wiki environment for reviews, the main idea being that people would prefer to read one review informed by 100 people as opposed to 100 different reviews. But Amazon beat me to the punch on that one. While I was working on the concept, Corey approached me and proposed a terrific business idea: "What if," he said, "we allowed people to upload and sell their digital wares on the Internet, just like people do on eBay?" Corey then told me his idea occured to him when he a close family friend made $5,000 selling a simple how-to doc she'd written (4-pages) on eBay for $5 per copy. I then told Corey about my idea to create a collaborative platform for the development of high-value content. After a month or two we were convinced we needed to start Yepic to provide the world with a place to create, buy, and sell high-value content. We were particularly convinced there was a huge market for this in long tail, or niche markets.

We started running the idea by friends and family as we pulled together our first round of funding. One buddy told me he was eager to start writing articles on how to care for extremely rare tools he loved to collect. He talked about how it was very difficult to find anything good on the Internet about them. Another friend said he'd write an article with several friends--using our wiki-platform--on how to score more than 700 on the GMAT (he scored 740). Another friend said she'd pull together several moms and write an article on how to handle 3 toddlers. Another friend talked about ways Yepic could be used to incent his tech support staff to actually write good self-support articles for customers. Another friend talked about pulling together an article informed by 10 families that had recently moved to and bought a home in the Bay area, their tips and tricks, mistakes, etc. And the list goes on and on. The sheer excitement we felt from each of these people we interviewed convinced us that we needed to get this community built, and fast.

Now we're a few months away from launching the full-blown service. We hope you'll love it. More posts to come soon.

Best,

Richard