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On Christmas Eve Day in 2012, I sat in a Starbucks and wrote an enthusiastic post about why it had been the year of the e-single. E-singles — works of journalism between 3,000 to 15,000 words, usually nonfiction and sold as individual ebooks — were “a true digital-native format,” I wrote, “the format for our time,” ideal to read curled up with your iPad.
With the crash and burn of Byliner this year, however, my enthusiasm seems less than prescient. Byliner, which launched in 2011, was one of the darlings of the literary startup scene (which is also not doing so hot these days). Its original mission was to publish original e-singles, both fiction and nonfiction, and also to create a sort of archival home for journalists on the web. But over the next couple of years, Byliner moved away from that mission, and in recent weeks bad news about the company has trickled out onto the web and then into the pages of the New York Times as the most high-profile executives, including CEO John Tayman and co-founder Mark Bryant, left the company.
Deanna Brown, Byliner’s president and the former CEO of Federated Media and Inside.com, is still at the company, and told me Friday that there is “not much to talk about” and “the company is still very much in business,” which seems more than a little disingenuous considering the emails it’s sent its authors. Regardless, does Byliner’s failure mean that longform journalism on the web is doomed? Or are Byliner’s problems specific to Byliner?
A subscription model that didn’t work
Many people I talked to over the last couple years wondered how Byliner was making money. The San Francisco-based company raised $1 million in seed funding and raised an undisclosed amount of further funds from investors like Avalon Ventures and Freestyle Capital. It seems that, for those investors, Byliner’s original strategy of selling individual e-singles wasn’t enough, and the company over time began to focus on a subscription model: Byliner Plus, which for $5.99 a month would give users unlimited access to Byliner’s original stories and other exclusive content. (In addition, Byliner continued to sell its works as individual e-singles for a couple of dollars apiece, through Amazon, Apple and other ebook retailers.)
When I met with Brown in New York earlier this year, she talked to me about the “third icon challenge”: Users of mobile devices have “the video streaming icon, the music streaming icon, and there is this third opportunity, which is the reading experience.” Byliner could be that “third icon” alongside Netflix and Spotify, Brown argued — a reader’s go-to “reading streaming” experience.
It’s probably not surprising that that didn’t work when so much longform journalism is free to read online, and existing communities like Longreads (which was acquired by WordPress parent company Automattic earlier this year) are happy to turn it up for you. In addition, read-it-later sites like Pocket — which Brown described to me as “a service or a tool as opposed to a curated, editorially driven product” — are increasingly suggesting stories to readers for free.
In addition, if any readers actually are looking for that “third icon,” Byliner would be competing in that area with existing ebook subscription services Oyster and Scribd, which both cost just a couple dollars more each month and offer unlimited access to hundreds of thousands of full-length books, many of which are well-known already. It’s by no means guaranteed that either Scribd or Oyster will get enough members to survive, so Byliner faced an even tougher path to success with a subscription model.
Longform journalism just isn’t a huge moneymaker
In the past few weeks, some Byliner authors have come out against the company, essentially arguing that they didn’t make as much money as they thought they would. In a New York Times op-ed, author Tony Horwitz wrote in detail about his bad experience with Byliner. The company paid him a $2,000 advance for a 40,000-word story that it sold for $2.99. While “Boom,” a story about the Keystone XL pipeline, “broke the top 25” on the Kindle Singles bestseller, “in the sales rankings on Amazon for Kindle Singles,” it only sold 700 or 800 copies in its first month of publication.
Another Byliner author, Jennie Erin Smith, received a $2,500 advance for a 14,500-word story on a Colombian drug trafficker. It sold 7,849 copies, netting her $3,878 — not bad at all, in my view, but, Smith told the Columbia Journalism Review, she “went into it thinking there was real money in it.”
Ultimately, the problem might be one of unrealistic expectations — both the unrealistic expectations that VCs had for Byliner, and unrealistic expectations of authors about how much money they could make. Ultimately, e-singles are like full-length books in that a lucky few will be bestsellers, but most won’t. Even as he complains in his op-ed, Horwitz sums it up well:
“Online journalism pays little or nothing and demands round-the-clock feeds. Very few writers or outlets can chase long investigative stories. I also question whether there’s an audience large enough to sustain long-form digital nonfiction, in a world where we’re drowning in bite-size content that’s mostly free and easy to consume. One reason ‘Boom’ sank, I suspect, is that there aren’t many people willing to pay even $2.99 to read at length about a trek through the oil patch, no matter how much I sexed it up with cowboys and strippers.”
That’s too bad, but it’s not a new revelation. What originally excited me about Byliner was that it wanted to let writers chase those long investigative stories and would pay them to do so. It didn’t work out. That doesn’t necessarily mean such a model can’t work — it just means the expectations have to be different. And by “different,” I primarily mean “lower.”
The Atavist, for instance, is still publishing original e-singles. But the company derives most of its revenue from Creatavist, the publishing platform that it licenses to others. Byliner “worked with some of the best writers out there and published really strong original stories,” Atavist CEO Evan Ratliff told me recently. “We more than anyone know how difficult that is to do. Our business model and our approach diverged from theirs a long time ago, so it doesn’t really relate to us in a significant way, but it does show how hard it is to try to find new ways to succeed in publishing in a digital world.”
And those publishing models that do succeed will likely never become the “third icon” next to Netflix or Spotify. There’s not enough demand, and there’s too much competition.
I think a big part of the problem is the question of who reads longform. It’s mainly journalists or writers of various levels and breeds. In order for any form of monetization to work, longform/narrative journalism needs to be made appealing and accessible to people who aren’t writers. Which, considering literacy in America (https://www.dosomething.org/facts/11-facts-about-literacy-america), means a lot of things regarding education. If the population were more functionally literate, there would be a greater audience interested in reading (a paying for) longform journalism.
I was a year-long subscriber to Byliner. I happily paid $2.99 for “Boom.” I was hungry for more. But Byliner’s content subsided into old, and older, material that didn’t seem worth the cost. I am an old-school reader, however attention-deficited, but I do like to read about things that reference events that occurred after I reached puberty. This is why I consumer Longform and Longreads. Not because they are free but because they have time relevance for me.
Formula for happiness: Regardless of length, publish excellent content by respected writers on topics of interest … format beautifully … price competitively … promote smartly, and – this is important – be happy with lifetime sales of 500 to 1000 units (any more being gravy), while at the same time building a publishing brand. Make that the business plan. For us at New Street, this paradigm works over and over again. But then we don’t have a board of venture capitalists starving for ROI. We just have a growing cadre of authors happy with their royalties and two full-time people who pull a decent (and growing) living out of the firm. The new tech-empowered publishing landscape is ideal country for cottage industries.
Nobody has been a bigger Byliner fan than me. I’ve wanted them to succeed from day one and, like yourself, Laura, I’m a believer in the combination of longform journalism and tablets. I think the value proposition is what’s not working here though.
Is a service like Byliner worth $6/month? I believe the answer to that question was yes two years ago but not so much today. I pay $10/month for my Oyster subscription and it provides access to 500K+ ebooks. All of a sudden $6/month for access to much shorter-form content seems pretty pricey, especially when it feels like much of that content can be had for free elsewhere.
Then there’s the Amazon factor. Amazon Prime may have gone up to $99/year but most people bought in for the free 2-day shipping so every time Amazon adds another element (e.g., streaming music), that content seems to have less value than it did on its own. In fact, I could see a service like Byliner making a ton of sense in something like Amazon Prime; you might not pay $6/month for it on its own but you’ll gladly use it as part of a $99/year Prime membership.
Writers and publishers won’t want to hear that because it means a smaller slice of the pie for them. With certain exceptions though, we’re heading to a future where the consumer price for digital content will continue to decline.
And, again, the question: How are “content providers” (more classically known as “writers”) to live, you know the ones that think up and type all the words that get posted on the internet around the clock? It’s become Dickensian. Okay, figure out the work-arounds, nobody’s stupid, but how can the non-writitng world expect people to work for free? Most grown-up wouldn’t work gratis–couldn’t, in fact–and when all the younger people who are perhaps thinking themselves lucky to have internships and then terribly paid dead-end jobs age out (or their parents can’t or won’t support them any longer) they will finally understand the increasing number of desperate laments from professional writers. Something, something has to give.
(PS I am employed.)
The true answer is DEMONETIZATION. Until we abandon money altogether, there will be continued war, growing poverty, ecological devastation and generalized unhappiness. Why must we pay to live on the planet we’re born on?
What about the model of “Patron Saint Journalism,” in the mold of the New Republic or The Washington Post? Some rich person funds journalism, with the unspoken and significant caveat that the investigative reporters won’t actively dig for dirt in the boss’s backyard.
I mean, there is no good way to crowd-source an objective article about Colombian drug traffickers. Either the world doesn’t get those exposés, or professionals need to be paid to write them with some reasonable expectation of both money for themselves and editorial protection for their sources.
Up until Hachette v. Amazon, I was naïve enough to think maybe Jeff Bezos was going to backstop some hard-hitting journalism for the sake of an informed populace. Might others step up, and would we ever trust them to get it right on big issues?
The point about the difficulty of crowdsourcing the Colombian drug trafficker article — or many of the other articles Byliner paid authors to write — is a good one. There are just not a ton of outlets paying for deeply reported longform journalism these days. (Mind you, I haven’t read Smith’s article, and I don’t know how deeply reported it was.)
We’re also seeing an example of the patron model with Pierre Omidyar’s First Look, I guess.
Scribd works for me, even with the relatively limited scope of works included, which is the main criticism leveled against it. There’s more than enough depth, at least in the SF / Fantasy genre, to satisfy even a hard core reader such as myself. I’d point out that Netflix is quite successful, despite similar limitations on currency and scope of content. Since I signed up, I’ve hardly even looked at my Kindle content… in fact, even the volume of reading encompassed by pring books already in hand and paid for, has dropped precipitously – the convenience factor of reading on my Galaxy S5, combined with the flat rate all you can eat model, has really put paid to my lifelong book buying habit. My reading habits are similar to Netflix style “binge watching”… I find a new author I like, and consume everything available (often an entire series, perhaps minus the last one or two most recently published volumes). The “substitution effect” is in full play here, and I think many hard core readers will have similar reactions. What this does to publishing industry business models, I don’t know… I suspect that the revenue model for backlist content will change radically (as it probably has for the TV and music industries), but that it will have (at least initially), minimal effect on revenues for newly published content.
I find it hard to believe that this “third icon” model for digital book publishing can’t be at least as successful (relatively speaking) as it has been with TV and music. Whether Scribd and / or Oyster has the correct business model is another thing entirely… but I’ll point out that the same thing can be said about every other streaming start up. Netflix has a long way to go before it can be said to have definitely proven the economics of streaming video. Contrawise, from a purely technical standpoint, “streaming” books is a vastly less demanding task. The volume of data to be stored and transmitted is miniscule by comparison, and “latency” is not an issue…
Thanks Thomas, it’s great to hear from someone who’s an active user of one of these subscription services and to get some early reports on how it’s changed your reading habits.
I don’t think it’s about figuring out monetization as much as figuring out the right format and language for internet media. The idea of “the grand narrative” fundamentally goes against the DNA of the Internet which is interactive and consists of a myriad of things linked together. I’m not saying you can’t distribute and read long format on digital devices but maybe it can’t be packaged by itself like we are currently trying to do…maybe the book is just better for that.
The monetization of all these old industries (literature, music, art etc) to fit into the new media form is a big issue. Eventually they will figure it out. Until they do it will be hard sledding for many.
Leslie
Please. There’s no indication that there’s any demand at all. It’s not that only a few people make big money, it’s that even the best selling books don’t make any money at all. The need for facts is sated by the Internet. No one even wants to spend 99 cents.
The issue is that the price $0.99 for something that may as well be garbage is throwing money away. Make it something that is $0.99 per year to access author’s year worth product and I’m sure should the author be any good he or she would get a 100,000 readers.
Of course even mediocre authors don’t think making $99k/year form their blog is good money because *gasp* they actually have to work for it.
Really? 100,000 readers? You’re quite optimistic. There are plenty of writers out there giving away things for free. I would be surprised if you got more than 1000 for anyone.
You are right of course. It is reflected through all areas of business such as the unpaid internships.
Have you seen the video by Damon Evans, CEO of Arena.com? Have a listen to it. Obviously the artists are going to have to band together and take action.
Leslie