Really interesting to see these numbers. I've been reading DF for years and years, and its is the only advertising model I've encountered that doesn't grate. His advertising is considerate, audience appropriate, and vetted. I feel good supporting his advertisers, because I feel good supporting him, and because they're just consistently things I'm happy to hear about.
I would really love to see more independent journalists follow his model, although obviously his market is more suited to this model than some others are. Still, I think there's a lot to learn, here.
I'd rather not. It introduces a pretty big conflict of interest (for example, Gruber would probably think twice before writing something negative about a former sponsor when he's on the record endorsing them) and blurs the line between advertising and editorial content. As mentioned in the article:
> the cost today ranges between $8,000 – $10,000 dollars per placement and you get to write your own post, essentially
Maybe this isn't a big deal for DF, but I can imagine this would lead to a total lack of trust for other independent journalists.
John has been sponsored by Google(1) and by Microsoft(2) both of which he has written some decidedly negative things about. I think he takes conflict of interest seriously, and has a strong division between his editorial and his advertising content.
I don't think it's as much of a "firewall" in the sense traditional news media (theoretically) tries to maintain as much as a fairly natural separation between the kinds of companies advertising with him and the kinds of topics he writes about. In practice, the chances are fairly small that he's going to have a reason to write negative things about Squarespace, let alone Desk, assuming he's done basic vetting of the product/service.
The failure mode for this theory, of course, is if one of the companies -- especially a service like Squarespace -- either shifts their business model to something slimy or is revealed to have been doing something slimy all along. Personally, I don't think Gruber would hesitate to both report on that and stop taking their ads -- doing so would have little to no effect on his bottom line.
(The observation made by another commenter about how many bloggers and, of course, podcasters pump Squarespace without actually using Squarespace is wryly amusing, though.)
Azure itself is pretty safe from Gruber's crosshairs. Google was less successful, but there is a common trend of companies paying their way into the good graces of Apple bloggers' inner circle (Squarespace, Backblaze, Everpix).
I'm sorry, but what you're implying is that these companies have sub-par products that unscrupulous writers have been willing to treat as well-made in exchange for cash payment. As someone who (very happily) uses both Backblaze and Squarespace I can safely say this is not the case, and that they're not just "buying their way into" bloggers' good graces.
I'm pretty sure that if they're in anyone else's good graces, it's because they provide a great product with solid service at a decent price. It's absolutely not because they had to bribe people to overlook the fact that they weren't really any good.
In essence, DF is an endorsement-based model. This is one where a justifiably trusted source uses their hard-won credibility to promote products that reinforce their credibility. It's pretty much the opposite of a model that allows people to "buy their way in". Indeed, that's the whole point. You can't buy your way in. If you don't have a decent product, you're not getting listed.
Yev from Backblaze here -> I love advertising with John. He's used us before so he approaches every read with a bit of knowledge. At this point, I just give him a few bullets I want him to hit (often new things in the product) and just let him riff on his own. It works great and allows the read to be more natural, instead of mechanical like some of the various other podcast sponsorships.
No, I don't think they are sub par. But I do think their exalted place in the Apple blog world is not earned by quality, but ad money. You don't see many of these bloggers actively using Squaresquare for anything but side projects, but they all push it as the go to platform to use even outside of ads. I would also contend that you can certainly buy your way in. See ads for stuff like Clean My Mac, which I am positive Gruber would never use himself.
I don't think there is anything extremely unscrupulous going on, just that there isn't much of a wall between editorial and advertisement with Gruber's model as some people claim.
This is actually a great example of something I wanted to dig up earlier, which is a DF sponsor that john clearly doesn't give a shit about. The tone of the 'thank you note' for that can be generously described as "professional". You can _almost_ hear him gritting his teeth.
> As someone who (very happily) uses both Backblaze and Squarespace
Just wanted to second your comment and add that Everpix too was also a really good product before they closed down (I still haven't found an alternative that works for me).
I feel like there's a big difference in talking negatively about a billion dollar company that pays for an advert and a small sub million dollar company. Would Microsoft even notice or care that he spoke critically about them once compared to a small startup that blew their advert money on his blog care?
I think you have to ask yourself the fundamental question. How does John make a living? Perhaps he could move to a paid subscription model. That seems fraught with risk but it's true it's a possibility. But even then you pander to your paid audience vs the paid advertiser (if all your paid subscribers are Apple fans and you noticed a 10% subscription cancellation when you belittle the Apple Watch what happens to your behavior?)
The next alternative is he relies on advertising. When there is a conflict of interest in advertising it's mostly around transparency (the site does legitimate and paid product and service reviews side by side and so you don't know what is paid content and what isn't) This approach though seems very transparent. The worse case scenario is a product or service he advertises becomes crappy (based on his backlog he wouldn't need to accept an upfront crappy product) and he doesn't allow them to sponsor again. The biggest crime is he holds off calling out said crappy product because at one time he took money from them. I'm not sure he'd do that and that would only be a real issue if JG was the sole or primary source of reviews for the service vs all the other channels that review products and give you a wide range of opinions to draw on if you need them.
TL;DR: All commercial models involving information sharing are flawed so you have to deal in shades of gray and this seems good to me.
Traditional journalism doesn't try and mix advertising and content to the level this does. This feels closer to BuzzFeed's infamous organic content (http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/12/buzzhome/) than it does to what a newspaper might do.
That's very traditional. Most computer magazines f.e. are under so much pressure that a complete separation is difficult.
Even the ones that still have a separation, are a little bit more gray in the sense, that they do special deals i.e. free software for their coverstory and so forth.
You could buy a shirt and it came with the membership, or pay less for just the RSS membership. He delivered a personal RSS link with a random string. That worked until people moved to Bloglines, because it shared URLs among all its users and thus exposed private URLs to anyone looking for the daringfireball.com feed. At that point, he moved to password protected feeds, until people moved to Google News, which didn't support password protected feeds. This is when he began the weekly sponsorship model.
It's a valid concern, but honestly I think the distorting effects are probably much less than e.g., having to chase clickbait topics for CPM advertising or having Carlos Slim be your largest single investor, etc.
> I'd rather not. It introduces a pretty big conflict of interest (for example, Gruber would probably think twice before writing something negative about a former sponsor when he's on the record endorsing them)
Generally the companies that advertise on his site are companies that his readers would find useful, but generally aren't the kind of companies that he discusses in his blog posts. Although [I believe] he has had Microsoft and Google products advertise on his site periodically, and his coverage of those companies has still been on his own terms.
Jason Snell wrote an interesting article about his experience with an advertiser and sponsorships. He's running his own blog now (Six Colors) with a similar model to Gruber.
For better and worse, it's the way things are going in the near future. People like Gruber and Alex Blumberg (Gimlet Media podcasts) have built up credibility, and are open about what is paid versus editorial, so the "native ads" are merely annoying rather than trust-destroying. Unfortunately, lots of people with a few page-views and more greed than sense will also try to get in on the action, and the web will be an even worse place.
On the other hand the advertising posts are very clearly indicated to be such, there's no attempt to actualy disguise them as editorial. Furthermore by explicitly posting endorsements with the other content he's drectly putting his own credibility on the line. If the advertised service is sub-par in any way it directly reflects on him.
PBS and NPR have to deal with this issue every year and their solution is pretty simple. They report it as they would want to, mention that X Co sponsored them in the past/present, and don't take their advertising dollars for that piece.
There's a big difference between saying "this segment is sponsored by X Co" and letting X Co write their own endorsement that they can then quote as a testimonial from you.
If you're referring to Desk quoting Gruber on their home page, they quoted from Gruber's "thank you" post which, while it borrows a lot from the original sponsor-written post, is still written by Gruber himself.
I think another reason the DF advertising model is so successful, for both the publisher and the advertiser, is that the advertisements don't distract from the publisher's content. And in this case it plays really well with the primary means of publication for DF, RSS.
Consider "traditional media": radio, television, and print. Yeah, we all love to hate commercials, etc.
But compare it to the Internet, which is a complete cesspool. I use my hometown newspaper as a example (http://www.ajc.com/). Many websites are completely unreadable, and/or require a supercomputer to fully render and execute the CSS/JS. And I believe it's fairly common knowledge now that these types of advertisements are hugely ineffective for the advertiser.
Many have continued to try and some have really found it to work. I advertised on a number of other blogs that have the exact same model: http://blog.desk.pm/2014-yir/
John's model is unique, though, not scalable and heavily gruber-dependent. It's something we can analyze as a particular phenomena, not a way to reinterpret advertising on the Web.
Look at podcasts. They are nearly all, in essence, using exactly Gruber’s model. It seems to me as though there is practically nothing else there …
(I’m not sure exactly where this podcast model is coming from. I think I first heard it – in an incarnation that is nearly totally similar to what DF does – on Dan Benjamin’s 5by5 network. That genesis would even sort of make sense, as Dan Benjamin are friends and used to be long-time co-hosts of a podcast. I obviously can’t recall exact dates, so I’m not even sure who came first there, actually. Now other podcasts and podcast networks are doing it, too.)
What that means is this: The actual hosts of the podcast read the ad in their voice, though they still say that it’s an ad read (that’s analogous to putting the ad directly on the website in the website layout together with the other content and in the RSS feed, though still marking it as sponsored content). Nearly all will also add in little personal touches. Those can be widely diverse, from a simple, slightly personalised thank you (as Gruber writes), to stories about how the hosts use the product or why they like it, all the way to specially produced editorial content for the sponsor (as Startup and Reply All from Gimlet Media are doing by, for example, interviewing their sponsors and talking to them about their business).
That’s practically identical to what Gruber does, just in another medium (and maybe the podcasts were even first and Gruber just cribbed from them and adopted it to his medium).
I honestly think this is at least somewhat workable on a wider scale. Not a billion dollar scale, sure, but a small operation making a small profit with a couple well paid staff? Sure, that’s very imaginable and partly already sort of happening.
I think Gruber is definitely unique and if he "disappeared" it would be hard to replace him.
In other words, what makes DF "work" is Gruber... and if he wasn't there... it wouldn't really work. It makes you wonder about the sustainability of "people-centric" companies.
I have thought often about this in terms of my own projects... how many of them would be sustainable without my very explicit presence?
I would really love to see more independent journalists follow his model, although obviously his market is more suited to this model than some others are. Still, I think there's a lot to learn, here.