Thoughts on The Printed Blog

We at Printcasting have always been as interested in the larger digital-print movement as we are in our own product. So it was with sadness that I saw the news yesterday that The Printed Blog is ceasing publication.

Joshua Karp, The Printed Blog's founder, started his experiment in January 2009 by printing articles and photos from bloggers on 11x17 papers. He sold ads to businesses, then distributed the papers at metro stops in Chicago and San Francisco. Since then, he has printed 16 editions and 80,000 copies, and in addition 100,000 copies of The Printed Blog were downloaded. But in the end, the startup costs for the new paper were too high. He decided to shut it down after trying and failing to get enough venture capital investment to keep things going.

I really admire what Joshua Karp attempted with The Printed Blog, and its failure does beg the question for other projects, like Printcasting, that are working in a similar space. But it's important to put The Printed Blog's fast rise and fall in context. For one thing, Karp himself said that the product expanded too quickly. I suspect that this, combined with the bad global economy, has a lot to do with it. Many great Internet companies whose ideas lived on in open source (or were resurrected in other companies later) went under in 2001 for the same reason.

But I don't think that's the only reason. In my opinion, The Printed Blog's approach was too top-down and resource intensive to work as a business. It was too similar to the existing "one-size-fits-all" newspaper model that is struggling not because it's based in print, but because it's too costly and untargeted to maintain healthy profits. As a result, The Printed Blog flew right into the same maelstrom that is affecting the traditional newspapers it was competing with.

I'm still optimistic about what we're doing with Printcasting.com because we have taken a different tack from the beginning. Ours is a more of bottom-up approach that allows anyone to create a printed version of their blog, a compilation of other blogs they find of interest, their favorite newspaper stories, a newsletter for an organization, or any number of other printed and printable materials.

In addition to that, Printcasting is really more like Printablecasting. You don't need to print anything to read a Printcast, as every edition includes a web-friendly view (see my Printcast, Danzine, for an example). We'll also be making a mobile-phone view later this summer, which is really simple to do thanks to our database-driven software.

But the biggest difference in our approach is our niche network focus. As anyone in the direct mail business will tell you, niche is where most of the untapped ad revenue potential is, and you can charge more significantly more for each ad when you print and distribute content. The last time I checked, the average cost per thousand impressions (CPM) for a typical online ad was around 37 cents, while the CPMs for niche magazines go anywhere from $20 to $200 depending on the interest, number of printed copies and demographics of readers.

The challenge is in how you reach those "long tail" advertisers. If you have to knock on every single business' door and create every single ad for them, you will soon go broke. It costs too much money to manually sell and build every $50 ad for every business in town.

For this reason, Printcasting has a self-serve advertising tool that lets businesses place ads on their own, eliminating some of the waste and cost around newspaper ad production. This week we quietly turned on the e-commerce system so that every ad costs $10, with the ability for each publisher to mark up prices for their publications. Also starting now, 60% of that ad revenue will go directly back to the publishers of each Printcast, and 30% will go to the content providers who made it possible. (We're still testing and building a few things, but will make a bigger announcement about e-commerce and revenue sharing next week when that's all complete).

Our hope is that the self-serve ad tool, combined with the promise for publishers to rake in most of the resulting ad revenue, will create enough incentive and cost savings to allow aspiring publishers -- maybe even those like Joshua Karp -- to create long-term, sustainable publishing businesses for themselves.
Nobody should need to put 6 figures of their own money into being a publisher. If anything, the self-serve advertising revenue should cover their printing costs and then some. That's the promise of the Printcasting project.

And we're not doing this alone. Expanding on our close relationship with The Bakersfield Californian (where I still work as an employee), we recently announced a partnership with MediaNews Group, which will make some of its content available to citizen publishers to remix into their own magazines. MediaNews Group will also use the Printcasting system to create some of its own niche magazines, something they do now manually at a profit, so this simply lowers their costs and thus increases their profit margin.

It also goes without saying that, thanks to the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Knight News Challenge, we have the advantage of time on our side. Printcasting has another 11 months of funding. We will use that time to continue to iterate based on user feedback.

So we're looking forward to the next year. If you haven't done so already, please give Printcasting a try by registering your content and/or creating a magazine, and give us your feedback so we can continue to improve. We hope the result will be the exact antithesis of The Printed Blog and the newspaper industry in general. One year from now, instead of talking about more publications that couldn't get off the ground, the story will be about how thousands of new publishers came onto the scene and not only survived, but made enough profit to continue publishing indefinitely.