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Help wanted
Are you able to sell web advertisements, knowledgeable about free software
and LWN, and interested in taking on some work? If so, LWN.net would like
to talk to you; please read on for details.
LWN's business model is a bit of an anomaly; there are few sites, anywhere, which get by primarily on subscriptions from their readers. There is a lot to like about the subscription model; among other things, it ensures that our real customers are our readers, not our advertisers. That keeps our priorities where they should be. But making an exclusively subscription-based model work is not an easy thing to do. Support from our readers has taken us a long way, but we're still not where we should be. Need we add that the economic turmoil seen over the last year hasn't helped? The truth of the matter is that advertising needs to be a part of the revenue mix if LWN is to be viable. What is also true is that LWN's staff is terrible at selling advertising. We are engineers, not sales people; we lack the skills, contacts, and interest required to do a good job at ad sales. And, we think, our readers would rather we focused on technology and writing instead of making phone calls. In the end, if advertising is going to play the part it must in keeping LWN going, somebody else is going to have to help make that happen. What we are hoping is that, out there somewhere, we can find an advertising sales person who is willing to work on a 100% commission basis. We need somebody who is not only good at what they do, but who also understands free software and the LWN reader community. We should not have to explain why ads which get between our readers and our content are not acceptable. We can't put time into pushing back against "Get the facts" campaigns and their like. We need, in other words, somebody who can be as fussy about what goes onto LWN as we are. It's a challenging job, to be sure. We are more constrained than many sites in terms of what we can accept. LWN's readership is also highly spread out across the world. But, out there somewhere, there must be somebody with the skills and the interest in taking on a challenge like this. If you are that person, please send a note to sales@lwn.net, and we'll talk. Or if you think you know that person, please draw their attention to this post. (Log in to post comments)
Help wanted Posted Jul 11, 2009 1:26 UTC (Sat) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link]
> [W]e are hoping [that] we can find an
> advertising sales person who is willing > to work on a 100% commission basis.
Unfortunate turn of phrase there?
If they're working on 100% commission, that means you're giving them 100%
Duncan
Help wanted Posted Jul 11, 2009 1:37 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
100% commission as opposed to base + commission not 100% of the income as commission
Help wanted Posted Jul 12, 2009 14:06 UTC (Sun) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link]
Yes, obviously, once I thought about it. But that wasn't the way it first
presented itself as I was reading, and it brought this reader up short, forcing me to reconsider it looking for other possible meanings (which upon doing I found).
As I said, unfortunate turn of phrase. Perhaps commission-only (killing
Help wanted Posted Jul 13, 2009 20:36 UTC (Mon) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] No need to change it; presumably a salesperson would know what the phrase means. Maybe the wording is a first line of defense against engineers-turned-salespeople; picture a Dilbert character thinking "Umh, 100% commission, attractive but OTOH obviously unsustainable as a business model; don't want to be there when it bursts" and moving along.
Help wanted Posted Jul 11, 2009 19:42 UTC (Sat) by syspig (guest, #41889) [Link]
Why hire a single person, when you have the entire community at your disposal?
Offer up incentives to your readers, to bring in advertisers. I'm sure the combined contacts your readers have within interested tech companies, far surpasses what a single sales droid could ever amass.
Community will help, sure Posted Jul 12, 2009 7:24 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Sure, but "community" can not sign contracts, sort 10'000 offers (9'900 of them bogus), etc. Someone must do it - and I think the idea is to find the person capable of doing that. Then you can really engage community.
Help wanted Posted Jul 12, 2009 17:56 UTC (Sun) by Sho (guest, #8956) [Link] Is this relevant? FSF welcomes AdBard network for free software advertising
Help wanted Posted Jul 13, 2009 14:58 UTC (Mon) by shmget (subscriber, #58347) [Link]
Our venerated editor said: "LWN's business model is a bit of an anomaly; there are few sites, anywhere, which get by primarily on subscriptions from their readers."
LWN is also the only Linux-oriented News website that provide that level of quality articles. Very, very rarely, after reading a LWN's article, do I feel I wasted my time.
What an ad sales rep needs Posted Jul 13, 2009 17:28 UTC (Mon) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link]
I hope Jon has received some nibbles from this.
The problem is that you don't sell ads based on the content, no matter how good it is. Media buyers don't understand the content. You sell the audience to the advertisers, so the rep needs to be able to send the media buyer the results of a reader survey. (Yes, all those questions like "What is your role in purchasing NAS devices?" and "How many employees does your company have?")
So, if a survey comes up for LWN or some other site you like, fill it out. (Unless you live in your parents' basement and dumpster-dive for computers--then install SurveyBlock Extreme Pro now.)
Help wanted Posted Jul 14, 2009 9:31 UTC (Tue) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link]
Advertising isn't wrong, bad ads are "wrong". Honestly, I'd rather LWN continued to be a great news source with a few carefully chosen ads and the crew could afford to invest some more - scale up a bit, take a team building weekend trip to a small island somewhere, etc. - than have to live with what must be a tough time economically at the moment.
Besides, I'd probably read the ads if they were reasonably appropriate to me. Twitter and word of mouth are great, but sometimes even the most connected of us discover a good thing through an ad on a website, even if we choose not to admit to it.
Help wanted or more subscribers! Posted Jul 14, 2009 13:12 UTC (Tue) by ber (subscriber, #2142) [Link] One alternative to get LWN were we as readers want it to be is: Have more subscribers! So if we want to be of use as a community, we could run a reader induced campaign.
Help wanted or more subscribers! Posted Jul 16, 2009 18:02 UTC (Thu) by deucalion (guest, #12904) [Link]
As the editor wrote:
> The truth of the matter is that advertising needs to be a part of the revenue mix if LWN is to be viable.
To be on the safe side, having multiple sources of income is usually a better choice for a business (unless you're a monopoly and know your clients will always need you.)
Therefore, the subscribers-only way isn't really an answer here.
Help wanted or more subscribers! Posted Jul 17, 2009 8:37 UTC (Fri) by ber (subscriber, #2142) [Link] What I am saying is that if we as subscribers want to help LWN, winning more subscriber could be another idea. Still it is good to find someone for the advertisment business, it does not exclude each other.
Help wanted Posted Jul 18, 2009 4:00 UTC (Sat) by apollock (subscriber, #14629) [Link]
Okay, so I work for Google, so I may just be a bit biased, but why go to all
of the trouble of trying to sell space, when you can just run AdSense on your site?
Is being choosy about the advertisers really worth all the extra hassle of
Is the typical LWN reader likely to click on ads anyway and not block them
What's your click-through rate like on your current ads?
Adsense Posted Jul 18, 2009 13:00 UTC (Sat) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] You may have noticed that we *do* run adsense on the site. There's two problems with it:
We would love it if Adsense just made this problem go away, but that is not the way of it.
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