At the core of the early organizational development of The Polymathic Institute will be a community of bloggers who, in addition to actualizing their polymathic lifestyle, will enable independent researchers, artists, designers and entrepreneurs. This Leonardo Network will provide the most intellectually sophisticated articles available anywhere.
Clearly, article writing is a very good fit for the polymath and, if done correctly, it is anything but a commitment to poverty for the sake of your art. Most people think of blogging as a hobby activity that hardly makes any money for the blogger, which is true for millions of bloggers. Indeed, if you go to WordPress or Blogger, monetize by signing up for Google Adsense and Amazon affiliate, and then post blog articles on your social media, you won't make much.
However, that is not what professional bloggers make and that is not how they make it. In one survey, the average professional blogger makes 138,000 USD. However, the elite bloggers, which Leonardo bloggers will be, earn seven figure, even eight figure, USD income. Timothy Sikes is estimated to earn $15 million per year. Perez Hilton earns $7 million per year. Tuts+ earns $2.5 million per year. We estimate that the average Leonardo blogger will earn around $500K per year with its top bloggers earning up to $3.0 million.
There are plenty of Internet sites that will tell you that it is not hard to accomplish this with some social media and SEO. It is, in fact, not hard. It's nearly impossible. However, it can be done and relatively easily with a better strategy. As we will explain, within three years, using a set of positive feedback loops built into the Leonardo Network, successful bloggers will average 200K reads per article and earn over 650K USD part time. Some will earn more.
The key is that Leonardo bloggers will be in the upper 0.1% in intellectual sophistication and that we, cooperatively, will isolate the top 5% of the population in intellectual sophistication who will become our pool of readers. They comprise a market of about 50 million, so getting your 200K readers is quite doable.
It works like this.
Each Leonardo blogger, if they have not already done so, will establish a blog and create an email subscription list of at least 1,000 subscribers. This and your Institute membership, is the ticket to polymathic blogging success. These subscribers will first come from their 'warm market' (Facebook, Twitter, Linked in, Google+, groups and BBs, your email list, etc.) but will quickly be augmented by SEO, and social media shares and forwards. Many bloggers will undertake a reward crowd funding, using the proceeds to increase their subscriber list. A warm market of 2,000 will typically generate 1,000 to 2,000 USD, which is enough to get to 1,000 subscribers.
Once there are 1,000 subscribers, reads, through shares, forwards, SEO, etc., will tend toward 1,000×2=2,000. This is where most bloggers get stuck and subscriptions only grow slowly. However, this is where, for Leonardo bloggers, positive feedback loops kick in and allow rapid growth to continue.
The key is your weekly newsletter. Every week you will send your subscribers a newsletter that will include an abstract and link to your article and four other articles that you acquired from the Network. If you do this well, the five articles of your newsletter will be an added attraction for new subscribers.
You will gain access to your additional four articles by subscribing to the four best Leonardo newsletters you can find in the network. This will give you twenty articles from which to choose the four for inclusion in your newsletter.
As you will propagate four articles each week, you will have your article included in four other newsletters. This will provide you with an immediate five fold increase in your readership.
However it increases your new subscribers five fold as well. It does so for your subscribing Leonardo bloggers as well. This creates an exponential growth function for your subscribers.
The Power is in the Fan
Suppose that you have x subscribers. If you make it easy for them, your subscribers will share your articles. You will likely get another X readers from these shares. However, your subscribers will likely have, in aggregate, 500K contacts and the subscribers who share your article will vary from week to week. Which of their contacts choose to read your article will also vary even when the same subscriber shares it.
Therefore, even though your readership coming from your subscribers and their shares may be only 2x in any given week, over the course of a year, your readership from this source may be 20x.
The same is true for your Leonardo subscribers. Four will subscribe to your newsletter but not all four will include your article in their newsletter each week. If two do, then it will go to 8 other Leonardo bloggers and, perhaps, of them, two more will include you.
That means that, through two levels, your articles, over time, will fan out over twenty newsletters and, though read by 10x in any given week, over the course of a year may be read by 100x.
This is important for two reasons. First, it vastly increases how many readers may consider subscribing to your newsletter. Second, it means that while advertisers pay for 10x readers, they will get exposure to 100x readers over time. The advertising won't go stale and unresponsive.
This fanning out of readership is a very important feature of the Leonardo Network.
Growth Goals
Combined with SEO, back links, and other forms of organic growth, the newsletter strategy will make 4,000 subscribers a good one year goal with a second year goal of 10,000 and a third year goal of 20,000. Income equivalents are 130K USD, 330K USD and 660K USD.
Many newsletters acquire mailing lists of 400K or more. http://www.dickmorris.com/advertising-information/
However, since Leonardo bloggers appeal to the 50 million most intellectually sophisticated readers on the Internet, they will likely be limited to 50,000 subscribers and 500,000 total weekly readers. The average Leonardo blogger may have 200,000 weekly readers.
Leonardo is Self Curating
The mechanisms of the Leonardo Network will cause article quality to increase over time. You, as a publisher of a Leonardo Newsletter, will recognize that your success is partially dependent upon the quality of the articles you include in your newsletters. Therefore, you will constantly be searching for better newsletters for article sourcing. And, of course, the Leonardo bloggers who subscribe to your newsletter will do the same. Therefore, bloggers will need to constantly up their game in order to stay in the game.
The Numbers
Leonardo bloggers write for the upper 5% of the population in intellectual sophistication. That equates to about 50 million. Their audiences are inveterate readers. An average of twenty articles read per week per market member is not unreasonable. That means that the numbers work out with 341 Leonardo bloggers (1+4+16+64+256). 341×200,000=68,200,000 weekly reads or about 1.6 weekly article reads per market member or about a 8% market share. These numbers suggest that Leonardo will become the dominant blog network (Yahoo, Forbes, The Economist, et alia have them as well) in its market, but the numbers are reasonable.
Monetization
Monetization of blogs has been a persistent problem. While 10USD CPM (it is what Dick Morris charges and is about average for a Facebook ad) has been an advertising industry standard, the primary resources for independent bloggers, Google's Adsense and Amazon's affiliate program, come nowhere near this revenue level. This problem is solved by a joint Leonardo and The Polymath ad sales enterprise. This enterprise will promote ads within Leonardo, remitting 80% to the blogger, retain 15% and remitting 5% to The Polymathic Institute. The ad agency will place ads for the maximum ROI. Some ads will be placed as straight CPM, (fixed cost based on add size and views) while others will be placed as CPC (revenue is based on clicks) and CPA (usually a % of sales generated). Because the ad agency receives a percent of revenue, they are well incentivised to place ads effectively.
The first ad that will be available to Leonardo bloggers will be for The Polymathic Institute, itself. It will be an affiliate program offering $90 for each Polymathic Institute membership and $300 for each block of prepaid ads (a proxy for equity in The Polymath). At 200K readers an ad requires $2,000 in revenue to meet the $10CPM standard. That is 6⅔ ad blocks, 22.2 Institute members or some combination of the two. Clearly, with 200,000 readers these numbers could be exceeded.
One of the most important ways that the Institute will promote polymathic research and careers is by developing a community of independent researchers. We will promote the research community to the traditional funding sources, but with the emergence of Kickstarter, Pattern, Experiment.com, etc. Private funding is becoming significant. The $2,000 ad revenue goal requires $20,000 of funding or 10¢ per reader. This is within range of realistic results. Certainly, some bloggers may undertake research of their own and their readers will be a much warmer market for them.
Many Institute members will undertake an arts activity as part of their polymathic lifestyle. This can be funded through Patreon or sale of product or some combination. Since Leonardo blogs identify a cohesive niche, ads for niche art may be cost effective for both the blogger and the artist.
While writer, researcher and artist will constitute common components of a finely crafted, polymathic lifestyle, like today, most productive activity will be involved in more mundane processes. Still, polymaths will want to engage in these enterprises with other polymaths. The substantially higher prevailing level of intellectual sophistication facilitates team building among members as it interferes with it in traditional work environments. Furthermore, they better understand the purchase decision criteria of Leonardo blog readers. Consequently, over time the Institute Enterprise Network will likely become the most profitable and largest source of Leonardo blog ad revenue.
Leonardo blogging is meant to be a twenty hour per week activity. It is assumed that the research and writing of a weekly article will require about eight hours. Reading and choosing the four additional articles should take about ten hours. Composing and sending the newsletter may take an hour and another hour is budgeted for administrative activities.
The Polymath and the Leonardo Network are designed to self curate and thereby evolve into the most prestigious source of analysis and commentary in the world. That extreme intellectual prestige will also be conferred upon the 300 to 350 bloggers who succeed.
In order to succeed one must retain Leonardo bloggers as subscribers and consistently produce a top quality newsletter. If you are interested in pursuing this as an important component of you polymsthic lifestyle, there is substantial benefit to early Institute Membership.
This will be the result of self curating processes that will continuously expunge the lowest quality bloggers to make room for higher quality ones. This will be the result of all bloggers seeking the best articles for their newsletters.
Clearly, article writing is a very good fit for the polymath and, if done correctly, it is anything but a commitment to poverty for the sake of your art. Most people think of blogging as a hobby activity that hardly makes any money for the blogger, which is true for millions of bloggers. Indeed, if you go to WordPress or Blogger, monetize by signing up for Google Adsense and Amazon affiliate, and then post blog articles on your social media, you won't make much.
However, that is not what professional bloggers make and that is not how they make it. In one survey, the average professional blogger makes 138,000 USD. However, the elite bloggers, which Leonardo bloggers will be, earn seven figure, even eight figure, USD income. Timothy Sikes is estimated to earn $15 million per year. Perez Hilton earns $7 million per year. Tuts+ earns $2.5 million per year. We estimate that the average Leonardo blogger will earn around $500K per year with its top bloggers earning up to $3.0 million.
There are plenty of Internet sites that will tell you that it is not hard to accomplish this with some social media and SEO. It is, in fact, not hard. It's nearly impossible. However, it can be done and relatively easily with a better strategy. As we will explain, within three years, using a set of positive feedback loops built into the Leonardo Network, successful bloggers will average 200K reads per article and earn over 650K USD part time. Some will earn more.
The key is that Leonardo bloggers will be in the upper 0.1% in intellectual sophistication and that we, cooperatively, will isolate the top 5% of the population in intellectual sophistication who will become our pool of readers. They comprise a market of about 50 million, so getting your 200K readers is quite doable.
It works like this.
Each Leonardo blogger, if they have not already done so, will establish a blog and create an email subscription list of at least 1,000 subscribers. This and your Institute membership, is the ticket to polymathic blogging success. These subscribers will first come from their 'warm market' (Facebook, Twitter, Linked in, Google+, groups and BBs, your email list, etc.) but will quickly be augmented by SEO, and social media shares and forwards. Many bloggers will undertake a reward crowd funding, using the proceeds to increase their subscriber list. A warm market of 2,000 will typically generate 1,000 to 2,000 USD, which is enough to get to 1,000 subscribers.
Once there are 1,000 subscribers, reads, through shares, forwards, SEO, etc., will tend toward 1,000×2=2,000. This is where most bloggers get stuck and subscriptions only grow slowly. However, this is where, for Leonardo bloggers, positive feedback loops kick in and allow rapid growth to continue.
The key is your weekly newsletter. Every week you will send your subscribers a newsletter that will include an abstract and link to your article and four other articles that you acquired from the Network. If you do this well, the five articles of your newsletter will be an added attraction for new subscribers.
You will gain access to your additional four articles by subscribing to the four best Leonardo newsletters you can find in the network. This will give you twenty articles from which to choose the four for inclusion in your newsletter.
As you will propagate four articles each week, you will have your article included in four other newsletters. This will provide you with an immediate five fold increase in your readership.
However it increases your new subscribers five fold as well. It does so for your subscribing Leonardo bloggers as well. This creates an exponential growth function for your subscribers.
The Power is in the Fan
Suppose that you have x subscribers. If you make it easy for them, your subscribers will share your articles. You will likely get another X readers from these shares. However, your subscribers will likely have, in aggregate, 500K contacts and the subscribers who share your article will vary from week to week. Which of their contacts choose to read your article will also vary even when the same subscriber shares it.
Therefore, even though your readership coming from your subscribers and their shares may be only 2x in any given week, over the course of a year, your readership from this source may be 20x.
The same is true for your Leonardo subscribers. Four will subscribe to your newsletter but not all four will include your article in their newsletter each week. If two do, then it will go to 8 other Leonardo bloggers and, perhaps, of them, two more will include you.
That means that, through two levels, your articles, over time, will fan out over twenty newsletters and, though read by 10x in any given week, over the course of a year may be read by 100x.
This is important for two reasons. First, it vastly increases how many readers may consider subscribing to your newsletter. Second, it means that while advertisers pay for 10x readers, they will get exposure to 100x readers over time. The advertising won't go stale and unresponsive.
This fanning out of readership is a very important feature of the Leonardo Network.
Growth Goals
Combined with SEO, back links, and other forms of organic growth, the newsletter strategy will make 4,000 subscribers a good one year goal with a second year goal of 10,000 and a third year goal of 20,000. Income equivalents are 130K USD, 330K USD and 660K USD.
Many newsletters acquire mailing lists of 400K or more. http://www.dickmorris.com/advertising-information/
However, since Leonardo bloggers appeal to the 50 million most intellectually sophisticated readers on the Internet, they will likely be limited to 50,000 subscribers and 500,000 total weekly readers. The average Leonardo blogger may have 200,000 weekly readers.
Leonardo is Self Curating
The mechanisms of the Leonardo Network will cause article quality to increase over time. You, as a publisher of a Leonardo Newsletter, will recognize that your success is partially dependent upon the quality of the articles you include in your newsletters. Therefore, you will constantly be searching for better newsletters for article sourcing. And, of course, the Leonardo bloggers who subscribe to your newsletter will do the same. Therefore, bloggers will need to constantly up their game in order to stay in the game.
The Numbers
Leonardo bloggers write for the upper 5% of the population in intellectual sophistication. That equates to about 50 million. Their audiences are inveterate readers. An average of twenty articles read per week per market member is not unreasonable. That means that the numbers work out with 341 Leonardo bloggers (1+4+16+64+256). 341×200,000=68,200,000 weekly reads or about 1.6 weekly article reads per market member or about a 8% market share. These numbers suggest that Leonardo will become the dominant blog network (Yahoo, Forbes, The Economist, et alia have them as well) in its market, but the numbers are reasonable.
Monetization
Monetization of blogs has been a persistent problem. While 10USD CPM (it is what Dick Morris charges and is about average for a Facebook ad) has been an advertising industry standard, the primary resources for independent bloggers, Google's Adsense and Amazon's affiliate program, come nowhere near this revenue level. This problem is solved by a joint Leonardo and The Polymath ad sales enterprise. This enterprise will promote ads within Leonardo, remitting 80% to the blogger, retain 15% and remitting 5% to The Polymathic Institute. The ad agency will place ads for the maximum ROI. Some ads will be placed as straight CPM, (fixed cost based on add size and views) while others will be placed as CPC (revenue is based on clicks) and CPA (usually a % of sales generated). Because the ad agency receives a percent of revenue, they are well incentivised to place ads effectively.
The first ad that will be available to Leonardo bloggers will be for The Polymathic Institute, itself. It will be an affiliate program offering $90 for each Polymathic Institute membership and $300 for each block of prepaid ads (a proxy for equity in The Polymath). At 200K readers an ad requires $2,000 in revenue to meet the $10CPM standard. That is 6⅔ ad blocks, 22.2 Institute members or some combination of the two. Clearly, with 200,000 readers these numbers could be exceeded.
One of the most important ways that the Institute will promote polymathic research and careers is by developing a community of independent researchers. We will promote the research community to the traditional funding sources, but with the emergence of Kickstarter, Pattern, Experiment.com, etc. Private funding is becoming significant. The $2,000 ad revenue goal requires $20,000 of funding or 10¢ per reader. This is within range of realistic results. Certainly, some bloggers may undertake research of their own and their readers will be a much warmer market for them.
Many Institute members will undertake an arts activity as part of their polymathic lifestyle. This can be funded through Patreon or sale of product or some combination. Since Leonardo blogs identify a cohesive niche, ads for niche art may be cost effective for both the blogger and the artist.
While writer, researcher and artist will constitute common components of a finely crafted, polymathic lifestyle, like today, most productive activity will be involved in more mundane processes. Still, polymaths will want to engage in these enterprises with other polymaths. The substantially higher prevailing level of intellectual sophistication facilitates team building among members as it interferes with it in traditional work environments. Furthermore, they better understand the purchase decision criteria of Leonardo blog readers. Consequently, over time the Institute Enterprise Network will likely become the most profitable and largest source of Leonardo blog ad revenue.
Leonardo blogging is meant to be a twenty hour per week activity. It is assumed that the research and writing of a weekly article will require about eight hours. Reading and choosing the four additional articles should take about ten hours. Composing and sending the newsletter may take an hour and another hour is budgeted for administrative activities.
The Polymath and the Leonardo Network are designed to self curate and thereby evolve into the most prestigious source of analysis and commentary in the world. That extreme intellectual prestige will also be conferred upon the 300 to 350 bloggers who succeed.
In order to succeed one must retain Leonardo bloggers as subscribers and consistently produce a top quality newsletter. If you are interested in pursuing this as an important component of you polymsthic lifestyle, there is substantial benefit to early Institute Membership.
This will be the result of self curating processes that will continuously expunge the lowest quality bloggers to make room for higher quality ones. This will be the result of all bloggers seeking the best articles for their newsletters.
Curious that your future still monetizes 'work'...and utilizes the current system
ReplyDeleteThe demonetized society, a la Jacques Fresco, is a fantasy in our lifetime. If it happens at some point in the future, I am not convinced that it will be a good thing. Either way, for now, building the Polymathic Institute and Leonardo/Polymath requires money.
DeleteWhy does it require money? Google Blogger is free. Google Sites is free.
DeleteWordPress is free. So is Weebly.
And I imagine there are many more free sites beyond those.
If you can do it for free, go ahead. I would love it if someone better at it than I would take it over. But I think that when you try to assemble Leonardo it will prove to be far more difficult than you imagine.
DeleteBlogger is not free any more than Facebook is free or ABC is free. You pay by being exposed to advertising. Often, they present ads to you, but sometimes they sell your contact information and you start receiving e-mails trying to sell you stuff.
ReplyDelete