I've recently become addicted to techmeme. I know I am late to the game.
I love the way that they are monetizing the site w/ sponsorships where companies can pay to have their feeds featured as a "sponsored post". It's very smart.
But, it's ridiculously out of the price range of the average blogger or startup to pay for. And I've heard it doesn't necessarily result in a lot of new subscribers. So, here's my thought...
Why not make mini-sponsorships possible? And instead of just syndicating the posts to the sidebar and only accepting 3 sponsors/month, accept as many as the market will bear. Why not start Sponsor.TechMeme.com where a company has to pay to be in a special sponsored meme tech tracking index? Why not tie the sponsorship to performance? I'll pay $1.00 for every new subscriber I get from techmeme. I'll pay $.05/site visitor. Techmeme could create a market around RSS-Subscriber acquisition. The market for acquiring email addresses is huge. Marketers are starting to use RSS as a tool to syndicate commercial content. And plenty of us bloggers benefit financially (adsense, new clients, book deals, etc) from increased attention. Plus, by applying a ranking algorithm to "commercial" content, the stuff that is most relevant surfaces to the top.
They could create a sponsormeme for every vertical they launch (techmeme, wesmirch, Ballbug, Memeorandum). I imagine edgio wouldn't mind putting their most popular auto classified listings next to the most popular content about cars. If they don't, ebay certainly would do it. I imagine Autoblog or Jalopnik wouldn't mind paying a few nickels per new subscriber. I can imagine politicians paying for every new subscriber that the paid version of Memeorandum delivered. I'd pay for every new event registration they delivered if they ran my paid event feed intermingled with TicketNetwork's feed of secondary tickets - next to a natural index of the most popular events in Boston compiled from zvents, upcoming.org, heyletsgo, eventful, etc on bostonmaevents.meme.com. There's some money to be made here. But, it's in the long tail of sifting through all the crappy commercial content and sorting out the good stuff.
Subscriber and reader acquisition is a big market. They should apply their filters to content providers willing to pay for the privilege. And that might be a scalable business model.
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