ONA session: BlogHer
Oct. 3, 2009
By Clyde Bentley, Ph.D., 2009-2010 Donald W. Reynolds Fellow, Associate Professor, Missouri School of Journalism
(Rough notes, not verbatim.)
Stone is the CEO and co-founder of BlogHer, an online community for women. Begun as a labor of love in 2005 as a conference for women bloggers, BlogHer is now the No. 1 community of blogs by women, reaching more than 14 million women each month via annual conferences, a Web hub, and a publishing network of more than 2,700 blog affiliates. The former VP of Programming and Editor-in-Chief of Women.com, Stone has launched blog networks and interactive programming for Hearst, Rodale Magazines, Knight-Ridder Digital and Glam media. She is the first internet journalist awarded a Nieman Fellowship by Harvard University.
In five years have gone from the one women’s blog site to one of many. Lots of specialty sites. I really never anticipated as a person from Missoula, Mont., to be the CEO of a major company going head-to-head. What we have learned as journalists has been very useful in this space.
7th largest Web site
The BlogHer community hub (http://blogher.com) is the Web's number-one guide to blogs by women. Every blogger is invited to list her blog and share her latest words, pictures, videos and opinions. As of May 16, 2009, more than 51,000 members have listed over 22,000 blogs by women, organized by topic. Every day, our 60+ editors write daily guides to the hottest blogging by women in 20+ popular topics, form politics, news and technology, to food, health and family.
A key part of success is our community guidelines
We define unacceptable content as anything included or linked that is:
- Being used to abuse, harass, stalk or threaten a person or persons
- Libelous, defamatory, knowingly false or misrepresents another person
- Infringes upon any copyright, trademark, trade secret or patent of any third party. (If you quote or excerpt someone's content, it is your responsibility to provide proper attribution to the original author. For a clear definition of proper attribution and fair use, please see The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Legal Guide for Bloggers at this URL: http://www.eff.org/bloggers/lg/.)
- Violates any obligation of confidentiality
- Violates the privacy, publicity, moral or any other right of any third party
Contains editorial content that has been commissioned and paid for by a third party, (either cash or goods in barter), and/or contains paid advertising links and/or SPAM or "Stupid Pointless Annoying Messages." For BlogHer's purposes, we define SPAM as anything that qualifies as nonsense unrelated to the discussion, either in comments on a blog or in our forums. This nonsense may take classic forms (e.g., simple links to unrelated content that are often advertising or e-commerce), or more insidious forms. - Can’t put paper posts.
Interestingly, these are very similar to the guidelines we developed for MyMissourian in 2004 (http://mymissourian.com/a-guide-to-submissions/) , except that we briefed them down to four sentences:
- No profanity
- No nudity
- No personal attacks
- No attacks on race, religion, national origin, gender or sexual orientation.
Like BlogHer, we found them very effective in preventing conflict and other problems.
Beginnings
In 2005, when came back from Nieman fellowship, was asked “where are the women bloggers? Let’s have a conference. 305 women from four continents. We were blown away with their interest.
What do you want?
- Conferences
- Service to show us what to do
- Better business model than Google AdSense. We need more than 25 cents per day
Told them OK, but must follow are guidelines. Became the schoolmarms of the Internet. I don’t think I would have had the confidence without knowing that we had good guideline.
- 109 million US women
- 89 million women online
- 42 million women online use social media each week – that’s 53%
Social media threat?
We are finding that Twitter is not hurting blogs. It is important, but the most important advocate for people who really care about the best in news and entertainment is the blogger.
We find that women are using Facebook to talk about BlogHer. We see growing discomfort with some of the tools “140 characters really just isn’t enough sometimes.” Long form is just as important as short form.
Blog participation
- 80% read blogs daily or 2-3 x week
- 57% blog daily or 2-3x week
Women are hard news junkies
50% of women said they tune into blogs for news on
- Technology
- politics
- current events
- green issues
- pregnancy/baby
- travel
- business and career
- personal finance
In 2008 7 of 10 of the posts on our site were about politics (?? not sure I heard this right). By election day, political blogs had gone from 600 to more than 2,000. There is a huge appetite among women for what the local media are writing and saying.
Women are shifting media, but not losing appetite. Women are not abandoning print. Contraction because the appetite is so enormous. The second a story is broken by a major paper, it streams across our network. But use newspapers less.
Advertising
BlogHer is a sought after user base.
85% have purchased based on recommendation from a blog.
Questions
How do you police the guidelines?
Constantly, diligently and with the help of our members. Aggressively monitor posts.
Pay?
We take 10% for administration, then split the remainder 50-50. We have a $10 CPM.
How do BlogHers raise their profiles?
If you build it, they will not come. The secret is to fall in love with your subject area. Have conversations with the users you seek. You should be comment on the topic blogs. Coalition is everything. Go to BlogHer and read 5-part essay on how to grow your blog.
How do you grow a start-up?
Consider venture funding. We did. They cared very much about the community, but it was terrifying.
Goals for the future?
To be profitable. Well on our way. Pay our 79 contributors. Convinced our government experts have worked. Believe in watchdog press. We want to help women go as far as they can go by giving them the tools. You will see us move into other forms of media – radio, video, books.