By Allan Maurer
CARY, NC—One problem with sites that support themselves and their content providers solely with advertising is that they tend to run search engine bait to attract traffic and you “End up with nothing but articles on Britany Spears,” says publisher and serial entrepreneur Bob Butler. Butler’s new site, BestThinking.com, live only 90 days, has already made it to the top five sites nominated for Mashable’s Open Web Access Awards in the “Best Site for Publisher’s” category. Bringing unique technology to the table, Best Thinking creates a new model for combining open access with quality content.
Butler, who founded Time Matters Software in 1991 and sold it to LexisNexis in 2004 for what he calls a “handsome” amount, self-funded BestThinking.com up to now but is talking with investors about a raise to accelerate its growth.
Butler points out that there is lots of open access online content that isn’t high quality and lots that is high quality but not open access.
Existing syndicators, such as AP, Reuters and Bloomberg have simply migrated to the Internet their relatively expensive traditional content model of using professional journalists and authors, but they are the exact opposite of open access.
Before, they couldn’t date
Butler’s executive summary for Best Thinking notes, “Websites like Wikipedia.org, AssociatedContent.com and Google’s Knol have proven that open access content communities can generate huge amounts of low cost content, collectively generating over 5 million pieces of knowledge-based content and over 100 million monthly unique visitors.”
But the advertising only business model, technology of those sites, and the use of anonymous content providers by sites such as Wikipedia, do not product quality good enough for features or journal articles on a par with traditional publishing.
The idea behind Best Thinking, Butler explains, is to use unique technology to marry the two “When before they couldn’t even date.”
Technology verifies contributor IDs
For one thing, the site uses a technology to verify its “thinkers’” identities that does not require them to provide a social security number or other personally identifying information.
Butler, who was a COO with LexisNexis after it bought his software company, learned some of his site’s ID verification tech there.
Simply requiring identity verification adds a dimension of reliability to the site’s content and comments not found on many others, he notes.
But the site is also designed from the ground up to support not only quality content, but also top search engine ranking based on site design and freshness, among other factors, rather than key word manipulation and other techniques ad-supported sites often use.
For instance, search engines love the sites precise and subject index, Butler says. It also offers an advanced content rating system developed by a Duke University business school professor that is very difficult to bias or manipulate.
Butler says he’s looking at two primary markets. Journal quality content targets the $44 billion scientific, technical and medical journal publishing business, while feature article content targets the estimated $155 billion general interest and news publication market, plus specialized blogging sites that need feature content.
While Butler says everyone is welcome, the site already has attracted a number of experts, 55 percent of whom have PhDs compared to Wikipedia’s 4 percent. Also, 46 percent of the site’s contributors are women, compared with Wikipedia’s 13 percent.
Earnings connected to quality content
Rather than looking solely to advertising for revenue, the site will also make money from content syndication, affiliate programs, subscriptions in which authors pay to keep their topics and pages free of ads, credentials verifications, additional bandwidth with storage, speaker bureau fees, and commissions on author content sales.
He says earnings will be directly related to the quality of the content. Already the site has 400 contributors, including Norb Vonnegut, a cousin of the late best-selling author Kurt Vonnegut.
Norb had trouble gaining search engine traction for his own blog and one he does for Huffington Post, but has found greater success posting it on Best Thinking. “He originally thought the name would help him but found himself buried under Kurt,” says Butler. “But after a few weeks on Best Thinking, he rose to number two on Google for the term “Vonnegut blog.”
That’s part of the site’s value proposition for its contributors, Butler says. “We can increase your visibility better than you can do on your own.”
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