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

---

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