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Blogger and investor (including in Wallstrip "stock culture meets pop culture") Howard Lindzon received an invitation to join the Reuters Affiliate Network. Some highlights ("lowlights"?):
Revenue Potential: Reuters will share 30% of the net revenue derived from your Blog by implementing mutually agreed advertising components to your site.
....
You sign the Letters of Agreement from ComScore and Nielsen (these are attached as Exhibits A and B). All traffic to your blog will then be assigned as Reuters traffic.
As is usually the case, the nitty gritty details are missing. Will the blog's URL change? How is the blog displayed on www.reuters.com? Just headlines? Every post? Framed? I assume (!?!) they aren't making a grab for a blog's existing advertising revenue (if any), but will they request that the "mutually agreed" components take the top spots? It may be reasonable for them to keep 70% of revenue from posts displayed on their site, but that's way too steep for ads that they broker to display on your blog. If the deal provides incremental traffic and revenue on their site with no reduction in direct visits and $, it may be worthwhile. But I'll bet the increment will be quite small. If Reuters is serious about this new network, it will try to sign up as many blogs as possible. Even if the blog posts get a prominent slot on reuters.com (which is doubtful), the more blogs there are, the less attention each will get.
In fairness to Reuters, they did list recognition and promotion as the 2 primary benefits, with revenue potential as #4. Assigning traffic may also not be any loss; few blogs get enough to be tracked individually by ComScore or Nielsen. If it becomes an issue, just cancel the agreement:
You or Reuters can cancel this agreement at any time at either party's discretion
(Do check the fine print on the ComScore and Nielsen contracts; that quote is just from the email.)
If you didn't get the email and want more info (including a real contact email), see the Reuters page.
Who signed up so far?
| Blog | Technorati | Alexa |
|---|---|---|
 Money Ning |
25,408 | 193,300 |
| ... we share insights on carefully saving money, investing, early retirement, mortgages, stocks ... | ||
| Bill Cara |
42,744 | 218,746 |
| Capital Markets & Social Equity | ||
| Financial Armageddon |
47,546 | 676,098 |
| Insights on debt, derivatives, government guarantees, the retirement system, and the coming economic unraveling | ||
| Dual Income No Kids |
104,933 | 831,996 |
| Personal Finance for Couples | ||
| Saving Advice* |
(none) | 46,226 |
| ... show you different ways to save money ... | ||
An aside: the Reuter's page omits "and the coming economic unraveling" from Financial Armageddon's tagline. Too controversial or just edited for space? Perhaps the latter: they also edited MoneyNing's tagline (as did I).
Dual Income No Kids joined on October 2; I didn't see announcements from the rest.
Bits of history: an earlier incarnation of the "Reuters Affiliate Network" was a service that let sites embed videos. The preliminary "labs" version got some coverage back in December 2005, though doesn't seem to have made much impact. Still, it was a worthwhile experiment and video embedding remains available.
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