We'll be in the other room . . . talking about you

I was spending some time this afternoon reviewing the logs for my site. (Typepad's logs are not great, so I use Measuremap). I am always curious to see who is linking to me, and how folks are finding my blog.

I was intrigued to see that a new referrer had sent me many readers over the last few days. An article at Bill Myers Online entitled "Pitching Your Product to Google" had been pointing people to my post about how to help us do business together by sending a well-composed email.

However, when I went to click on it and read Bill's take on my post, I was asked to subscribe for $24.95 for three months. Yikes.

This was a little frustrating. I don't want to get into the copyright aspects, etc, because I am no real student of those laws. Nevertheless, and more importantly, I am frustrated as a blogger. I publish to start a conversation, to hear reaction. It bothers me to think that the other half of the conversation is locked behind a walled garden. Even the NYTimes allows permalinking behind their gates.

Don't get me wrong. I am all for people making a living with newsletters, etc. I love relatively independent content. I look forward to the day when Google gets so good at AdSense that subscriptions are no longer needed to monetize valuable writing. However, for as long as those works are about or are derivatives of a conversation from my blog, I think it is fair to explore ways to include my readers.

I sent an email to Bill. I will let you know what I hear.

Update: Bill emailed me to say that the link was contained in a discussion forum on his site and not one of his posts. I appreciate his quick turnaround, but still don't get why the forum would be gated. Anyway, it was nice to see someone be so responsive.

Comments

[Tim Kerber]

Chris,

I enjoy your blog and was the person who made mention of it at bmyers.com's discussion forum.

The main reason for having the "walled" discussion forum is to maintain the quality and a bit of accountability of posts in there.

Instead of having a truly public forum where people can spam, Bill's membership site (which is superb by the way) creates an extremely intelligent and helpful environment for product developers.

As a subscription site owner myself (I own two), I also look forward to the day where adsense ads can encourage more free sharing of high quality content. I do have adsense on select articles on my sites but the main revenue generator is still the members of my sites.

Thanks for all of your work on your blog. It makes for great reading. The irony is that the quality of your content reminds me of the great posts and articles which are at bmyers.com.

The only difference is Bill has 1,000+ articles and thousands of postings over the last 6 years. I'm not downplaying your hard work, just explaining why I gladly pay to be a member of his site.

Tim
www.SmallBusinessWebSite.com
www.MarketingYourDVD.com

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