Hi Leslie:

Thanks for the great post. We're elated to get mentioned at Fast Company, a publication we regularly read here at Yepic. My name is Richard and I'm one of Yepic's creators.

I wanted to take a stab at answering your question "Do you think bloggers have a well of premium content for which people will pay?"

I do, but with some qualification. I think content that sells has to rise above the quality and value of content that is readily available via search. Here are some ways I think successful information entrepreneurs will use Yepic.

1. Bloggers with loyal audiences giving the audiences more of what they want. There's a brevity and conversational style in blog posts that generally leaves me wanting more, particularly with my favorite blogs. Bloggers are busy, and it probably doesn't make sense to take much more than 90 minutes per post when all you're making is ad-revenues. But I'd like to see what Guy Kawasaki could put together on how to raise venture capital if he took a couple of weeks and wrote something really serious. I'd happily pay for it. I have a hunch there are millions of other blog readers who feel just the same way about their favorite bloggers.

2. Information as a service. Often I need information and don't have the time to search for it. Or I spend an hour--or five--searching and still can't find what I need. Once I do start to find stuff that seems relevant, I'm always wondering if I can trust it or not. Authors who have already earned trust with an audience will be able to do great stuff with our content request platform. I'd like to see Michael Arrington set up a profile page and start taking direct requests from his TechCrunch readers. I've already compiled a list of tid-bits of info I'd pay $5, $10, even $50 for from him.

3. Living information. Part of information's value, at least for me, is derived from how current it is. I buy books, download PDFs, read blog posts, etc., and the information quickly goes stale. At the very least it's not able to benefit from a virtuous cycle of reader feedback once it's been published. Yepic's platform has been optimized to give authors the ability to constantly update articles their users have purchased. We set this up first becuase we think readers will be generous in giving feedback to authors . . . "Your article was good, but I'd really like more depth and treatment here and here." Our platform gives the author the ability to quickly respond to this information and update the article, thus making it more valuable to the user who bought and to future consumers.
There are other types of information I think will thrive on Yepic. I'd like to see a user start aggregating content on Google's Zeitgeist topics, kind of "Best of the web" articles that pull together and synthesize all the best information that shows up on Google's most popular searches.

4. Groupthink. Wikipedia's enormous success underscores the power of collaboration between great minds. Yepic's platform fully supports wiki-style editing, and we think several of our best pieces of content will come from users who collaborate together to produce information.

Thanks again for the great write up. Richard

I agree with Mr. Tripp in one sense - paid for information must rise above what is readily available. Sure, much of the information we need is on the web but often it is a case of TMI - too much information. The time spent to actually decipher what is valuable and what is fluff hopefully can be eliminated by using a service such as Yepic. I have used Elance in the past but have been disappointed by the level of expertise. The "ideal author" feature seems like an answer to the problem - I should be able to qualify a potential author. I will give the service a try.

Ron Borg

After a few hours of sleep I wanted to add just a couple of thoughts:

First, I should have noted in my first comment that Yepic is in its early stages, having just been officially beta-launched this last Thursday. We thought long and hard about "seeding" Yepic with content so that the first users would find a few thousand articles with an interesting flavor, but ultimately we decided not to. Another content portal we read about did that and got poor reviews on the day of launch for having cheap information. We instead decided to launch with a focus on recruiting content-creators. We're heavily recruiting content producers right now, and I don't forsee premium content really flourishing on the site until we've successfully recruited several authors to come in and create it. We really don't know how long that will take, but that's our current focus, and that's why our press release targeted bloggers so specifically. Without question they are among the web's most trusted information sources, and we believe they are the people who will create the most immediate value in Yepic.

But Ron's comment, and Leslie's focus on our content requests and the "ideal author" feature, make me wonder if in addition to bloggers we need to immediately focus on ensuring there are mechanisms in place for getting requests answered VERY quickly on the site, and by the right people. I'm going to think long and hard about that. I wonder if there's a way to more broadly publicize the fact that there are people who have articulated their needs and are willing to pay money to the right person? Perhaps an RSS feed of Yepic content requests that can be embedded in any type of portal software (pageflakes, my.yahoo?).

Richard

I agree with Ron. When I am using the web to find basic information like the address of a restaurant--Google works great. When I want deeper information where the information needs to be synthesized from many sources, I increasingly go to Wikipedia. The problem is that Wikipedia quality is pretty inconsistent and it doesn't always have the types of information that I am looking for. There have definitely been times when I would have been willing to pay for an expertly written article on a topic I was researching.

I am sure that over time the business model will be fine tuned. And if everyone thinks long and hard they can probably find all kinds of things that are wrong with it.

My first reaction was that it is a great idea. I am currently working on my thesis of which I think it can be of interest to certain professionals. It would be wonderful if I could offer it at Yepic. On the other hand if someone is looking for an article on that same topic and would offer even $500 for an article - yet to be written - I would not do it. Why? Because it doesn't pay for the amount of time it cost to write the article. The money I could otherwise make in that time I cannot earn, so writing the article may come with high opportunity cost.

I once read somewhere that a good author writes a page a day. So it costs a lot of time. If the writing is not the core activity of the inidividual that person may make more money in his regular business or work. Especially good authors probably have other offers to make money. And in my example the fee is $500 and not $5. Of course the money is in the numbers, but as an author I would like to have some guarantee of earnings before I spend time on writing an article.

So I would offer something that is already written, but I would not respond to a request for an article without a guarantee of earnings.

Hi Ron:

I agree completely with your feedback on the importance of ratings. Did you notice how every Yepic article and author has a rating? Ratings are set by other users, and users also have the ability to write public comments/reviews about authors and articles on the site. The green smiley face is meant to indicate high-quality/value; the yellow plain face means the content is OK but not worth paying for; the red frown face means the article should not be on Yepic, either because the quality or value is very low. We should probably make the ratings more prominent.

I'm highly intrigued by your thinking on user experiences . . . and it highlights a line of thought that I hope will become a trend among bloggers and other content creators: "How can I use Yepic to make money?" In the end, Yepic is a platform that authors can use in any way they choose. I think experts like yourself would probably find sending traffic to Yepic less appealing. What about using Yepic as a back-end system for handling payment and delivery of content you sold directly from your website? You can link to Yepic article summaries from any site or blog, and we're building some tools that will give you the ability to sell Yepic articles directly on your site, maybe even serve up the Yepic content right on your site as well.

Corey and I have a lot of ideas about how Yepic could work, but we've always firmly believed that the best business models would be developed by the users themselves. In many respects, Yepic will just be the set of tools the real info entreprenuers use.

OK... I've checked out the site and have a few questions/comments.
First - the qualifications of authors is most important. Qualification
requests are great but hey, these are authors. Actors make great
politicians and authors write the best resumes. What I like about Elance is their rating system and I think it is important to have that within the site, Richard - like Ebay's feedback, it gives a level of comfort in doing business with someone.

I question why would expert authors would contribute to the site. I write articles in order to gain traffic to my sites - as many do. My tagline works to add backlinks to them. I can submit to article directories knowing that webmasters peruse them for effective content for their site(s) and can trust that they will retain my tagline within their site . As an author in financial matters, would I look to earn
$1 - $5 for an article that may take an hour or more for it to be used by a person at home looking for some information? Doubtful. An author that does simply isn't make enough money.

Now, if the site is positioned toward user Experiences - that I can see. $1 - $5 for writing about a particular experience - I believe you may get some activity that way. But my opinion on an experience I had certainly does not qualify me as an expert.

In short, I question whether you are positioned to go up against
Elance, article directories, forums or something else entirely. For
my money, positioning toward actual experiences would be your best bet.
I'll wait and see.

Hmm. I'm skeptical. The first thing I did after clicking one of your links to yepic was to get an error message:

"error here :-)"

Hi KH:

I caught that too. We're very sorry for the short outage. It lasted for less than 5 minutes and turns out it was a problem with our hosting platform, Media Temple. Media Temple has been terrific to work with thus far, we started using it after reading Michael Arrington's recommendation of the platform on TechCrunch. But it looks like there are a few kinks to iron out. We're currently talking to them about their error messages. They need to serve up something that helps people understand that it's the hosting platform and not the software that's struggling.

Please come back over and give us a try. We're in our beta period and I can't promise there won't be glitches, but I'd hate to lose a potential user to a system outage that wasn't our fault.

Best,

Richard

No no... my mistake.. dont know how I missed the rating system. Possibly I didnt log in? Rating system is fine.

I will have to think about the different ways to use Yepic. Payment processing? I like that idea... how would it work?

How about offering different categories not only of subjects but also "type of author" - Expert / Non Expert with direct experience / Observer?

Sometimes I dont want and "Expert" opinion, just actual experiences - like I wont read movie reviews but I'll listen to a freind. I know I can make a request but it would be good when responding to requests you would choose your category of writer. Just a thought.

Ron Borg

Just last week I had some very specific questions I needed researched. As a "flying skinny" entrepreneur, I don't have the staff to devote to answering questions. I looked to Google Answers to hire a researcher, but found that it was gone! GA admittedly had some clear flaws. However, if Yepic can figure out a fair scale to monetize individual research, I believe this is a site that could gain a big following in the coming year.