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Control online

Nice posting from Adriana about what you can and cannot control online….

Online you’d better control what you can, not what you wish you could.
Controlling others has always been a delusion, controlling your
identity and your own expression is where it is at.

It is becoming clear that the days of being able to get advertising alongside your blog content are numbered.  There is a new Firefox extension that allows you to block adverts. And like many it’s a free download - part of the brave new world of opensource.

Now that this business model is challenged, we need to find a new one that pays for our time online… and makes the investment viable for us and our readers. 
A new specialist newsletter that I read, has just appealed for donations….. So wrong…. so last century.  What they should be doing is:

1. Enable a RSS feed…
2. Build a mailing list of subscribers
3. Sell advertising (if they want) based on reader numbers and provable downloads
4. Migrate readers to paid-for content over time when the service is proven
5.  And as an aside, a 12 meg pdf format is a tyranny…. just publish online…..

I wrote an

This entry was posted on Monday, August 27th, 2007 at 5:48 pm and is filed under Change Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Control online”

  1. Leo Plaw Says:
    August 27th, 2007 at 11:53 pm

    Actually, the FireFox plugin you mentioned, “Adblock” or “Adblock plus” has been around since 2005. So the whining guy mentioned in Adrian’s posting has nothing new to complain about. Its obvious that his own readers have become more savvy and tired of in your face adverts. He needs to stop living in the past and catch up.

  2. Max Says:
    August 28th, 2007 at 9:04 am

    Indeed, “Rowing Voice” should look at other ways of raising revenues. There a a few blogs out there that I happily pay a few dollars a month for and a “Rowing Voice” blog would fall into that category. The blog format would also make the content more timely and relevant.

    And yes, they really should enable full RSS feeds, but so should you. Partial RSS feeds are a huge annoyance for anyone who subscribes to a lot of feeds or reads feeds offline.

  3. Rebecca Caroe Says:
    September 2nd, 2007 at 5:06 pm

    Max

    thanks for your coment. However I am curious about your suggestion that full RSS feeds are not enabled from this site. What’s the issue you encounger and I’ll see if I can fix it.

    Thanks again

    Rebecca

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