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Category: Revenue

Contenture introduces microsubscriptions to help you monetize your blog

Well, the folks over at Portland-based Contenture have been offering up some other ideas for getting reimbursed for their efforts by making it up on volume. Today, they’ve launched their latest feature: microsubscriptions.

Rick Turoczy on July 1, 2009

[HTML2]When it comes to figuring out how to make a living off of producing content—especially online content—everyone is scratching their heads. Newspapers, television stations, and of course bloggers. One thing is for sure: ads aren’t quite cutting it, these days.

What to do? Well, the folks over at Portland-based Contenture have been offering up some other ideas for bloggers to get reimbursed for their efforts—by making it up on volume. Today, they’ve launched their latest feature: microsubscriptions. Read More

Iterasi hints at fee-based product

So today, Iterasi hinted at something to satisfy that request: a fee-based version of the Iterasi service.

Rick Turoczy on June 11, 2009

[Full disclosure: Iterasi is a client of mine. As such, I have been privy to discussions about this topic. While I have acted as a sounding board on the concept, I have not directly participated in the development or marketing of this product.]

Times are tough for everyone. Especially startups. So tough, that people are starting with the crazy talk. Crazy talk like “Gee I don’t know. Maybe we should actually pay to use that functionality?” This time, those crazy people are users of Portland-based Iterasi‘s currently free product who are interested in seeing the service sticking around.

Iterasi’s response? The customer—or would be customer in this case—is always right. Read More

Toonlet enables creation of Becker Street, the Kindle comic book

Rick Turoczy on June 2, 2009

It’s no secret that part of the magic of this generation of Web startups is the whole social aspect of what’s happening. And while, no doubt, that’s a big component of what we see occurring, there’s something more important that’s often overlooked: enabling.

Web 2.0 is all about enabling. Enabling you to do things that would be practically impossible without the technology. Things like enabling you to find what you want when you want it. Enabling you to broadcast your opinion to the world, quickly and easily. And enabling you to do things like build comics and release Kindle books. Read More

Monetize content without ads? Contenture offers easy subscriber micropayments, freemium content

Rick Turoczy on May 26, 2009

No doubt, you’ve heard me rave about Clicky, the Portland-based Web analytics tool that’s got a ton of cool features for a very affordable price.

Well, far from a one-trick pony, the Clicky team has just released their latest product Contenture, a service that hopes to help content publishers everywhere create some revenue from the content they’re creating. Read More

SplashCast pulls plug on free user-generated channels

Rick Turoczy on January 29, 2009

splashcast.jpgPortland-based SplashCast—which has gone through any number of interesting permutations as they worked to find a revenue model for their technology—has just announced that they will no longer be supporting free user-generated channels. The decision had to be a tough one, given that it was this community groundswell that brought the service to the attention of its current customer base: media companies and advertisers.

Over the past several months, we’ve been less and less focused on our “free” product, that is, the user generated channels. While we have well over 100,000 publishers, we simply haven’t been dedicating attention and resources to this part of the business.

All successful startup companies must focus. SplashCast is no different. Therefore, we have decided to discontinue our user generated content product as of February 11. We want to give our loyal (and brilliantly creative) users a chance to find other services that meet their needs.

While I’m sad to see this free service disappear—especially when it comes to rounding up Ignite Portland presentations—I can appreciate where SplashCast is trying to go. And while it would have been great to see them offer a pay version of the user-generated content service, there were likely some legal ramifications of SplashCast making money off of people repurposing other people’s intellectual property.

Suffice it to say, while this is a painful announcement for those early users and supporters of the service, this has been—obviously—a long time coming. Better to see SplashCast gnaw off a proverbial leg to escape the trap, then go down with the ship. To completely mix metaphors.

Things are tough all over. SplashCast isn’t alone in reducing its free offerings to the benefit of the business. A couple of little companies of which you may have heard, Google and Yahoo!, are among the thousands of companies that have been going through similar slimmings to deal with the current economy, as well.

Finding focus is terribly difficult for any company—especially when it comes at the expense of faithful users. But it would be nice to see SplashCast sticking around. And if they have to forego their free services to do it? So be it.