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| Find Your Match on Hitch.me, the Dating Site for LinkedIn Professionals | | Thursday, January 12, 2012 11:49 PM | Veena Bissram |
|  The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. Name: Hitch.me Quick Pitch: Hitch.me is a dating site for LinkedIn professionals. Genius Idea: Connects the dating world and the professional world for a secure, safe online dating platform. After noticing how unsafe some online dating sites are and how many are filled with scammers and sex offenders, Naveed Nadir wanted to fill a void in the online dating world. He decided to marry the dating world and professional world by creating Hitch.me, the first and only dating platform for LinkedIn professionals. "There are a lot of dating websites out there but most people on those sites lie and have fake profiles," Naveed Nadir, founder of Hitch.me, told Mashable. "With LinkedIn, people get a sense of security and they feel more comfortable with the network." The online dating site lets users browse through profiles of hundreds of LinkedIn professionals all over the world, send them private smiles (without words), pitches (250 characters) and even presentations (private images and videos). Once you sign into Hitch.me using your LinkedIn account, your professional information, including your LinkedIn photo, is automatically added to your profile. To keep the site professional, users cannot change or modify their profile photo. Users can then fill out their own personal profile, which includes information such as age, date of birth, interests, photos, etc. Hitch.me's privacy options lets users limit the visibility of their personal profiles to only selected individuals. To save you the hassle of searching for compatible users, Hitch.me shows you all of your matches with their professional and personal profiles on your own dashboard. Although Hitch.me does not charge a monthly fee, credits are required to view personal profiles and send messages. Users receive 200 free credits upon signing up and 100 credits per each person that signs up by clicking on a shared link that users can post to their social networks. Thereafter, credits cost $10 for 300, $25 for 1,000 and $50 for 2,500. Once you pay via credit card, a receipt is sent to your email and you obtain full access to browse professional and personal profiles and send messages. Twenty credits are required to unlock a profile or send a smile, 50 to send a pitch and 100 to send a presentation. ''The intent is to keep Hitch.me professional and to make it as private and secure as possible,'' says Nadir. Hitch.me is self-funded and has officially launched Thursday. Image courtesy of iStock, dizign54 Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark
The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today. |
| How the Australian Open Is Acing Digital Media | | Thursday, January 12, 2012 10:40 PM | Sam Laird |
|  The 2012 Australian Open Grand Slam tennis tournament may just be the most digitally connected major sporting event of all time. A Slamtracker already provides real-time updates of qualifying play that began on Wednesday, and fans can relive and share their favorite moments via Facebook and Twitter through a database of classic matches. But the real fun begins when the tournament officially begins next Monday. Tournament officials plan to man the @AustralianOpen Twitter feed 24 hours per day all the way through final matches on Jan. 29 for the event's global audience. There will be a fan leader board that ranks players based on buzz and provides a social counterpoint to on-court results. There will even be a team of selected "Fan-bassadors" who prove themselves by being particular active online and sharing a wealth of tennis knowledge. The Australian Open has always been on the cutting edge of social media use among tennis's major Grand Slam competitions. But it's taking a new step this year by uniting everything under the umbrella of what organizers call a "social media hub" Fan Centre. "We're concentrating more than ever on engaging socially with our fans," Daniel Lattimer, who works on the digital team for the event, told Mashable. "We were the first Grand Slam on Twitter, and engagement has been going up there and on Facebook, so it's important to provide people with that complement to the actual watching of the tennis during the tournament." Australian Open fans won't just be able to engage in dialogue with one another and tournament officials via social media -- they'll also participate in competitions of their own and even have the spotlight turned back on themselves at times. The Fan Centre leader board will continuously rank the top 10 male and female players at the tournament according to who is being mentioned the most on social media and whose content is gaining the most views on the Australian Open site. Fan-bassadors, meanwhile, will be chosen according to who provides the most useful analysis and commentary from different corners of the globe and set up with profiles on the main tournament site featuring an avatar and small bio. The platform presents a great opportunity for fans to gain traffic for their personal blogs and sites via AustralianOpen.com's huge audience. "We're kind of tapping into people's competitiveness as fans as well as their love for the players," said Kim Trangrove, the digital manager for Tennis Australia, the sport's governing body Down Under. Lattimer said that they hope to have selected Fan-bassadors from as many countries as possible by tournament's end to help promote the Australian Open worldwide and spread news through different time zones. Additional digital initiatives of the tournament include live-streamed in-house video coverage, social prediction games, new mobile websites and apps for iPhone and Android. But the slew of social media engagement doesn't just serve the Australian Open -- it serves a more ambitious interest, too. "Our overriding goal is to increase interest in tennis; it always come back to that," Trengrove said. "Ultimately, we want to get people playing the sport too, and our goal is to get 4 million people playing here by 2016." How important to you think digital and social engagement is for sporting events like the Australian Open? Let us know in the comments. |
| 5 Proven Ways to Generate Revenue From Facebook | | Thursday, January 12, 2012 10:22 PM | Brian Carter |
|  Brian Carter is author of The Like Economy: How Businesses Make Money With Facebook and co-author of Facebook Marketing: Leveraging Facebook's Features For Your Marketing Campaigns. He is a keynote speaker, trainer and consultant. Facebook, with its 800+ million users, presents a huge opportunity for business. But the first question people ask is, "Can it really generate money?" If you've read any of the Facebook marketing case studies over the last year, you've seen examples of small business profits and boosts in ecommerce sales via Facebook sharing. If your business is ready to move toward Facebook profits, your next question should be: "What distinguishes profitable and unprofitable Facebook marketing campaigns?" First, consider your revenue model. What steps will get your users to buy? How do you attract their attention in the first place? What does the conversion funnel look like? And how does Facebook fit with the marketing channels that already work for you, like email, text messages and affiliate revenue? There are a number of strategies companies use to do Facebook business effectively. Let's look at five of them. 1. Advertising-Based Ecommerce Marketers can leverage the massive reach and highly customizable targeting of Facebook's ad platform. They can create ads that take clickers straight to an ecommerce site, bypassing fan marketing entirely. The ads-direct-to-websites option is often overlooked, but can be immediately profitable. If you're not 100% sure about committing to the time and creativity required for fan marketing, then test direct-to-site ad traffic first. For example, Vamplets.com, which sells plush vampire baby dolls, achieved a 300% ROI on ecommerce sales in its first month of advertising directly to the ecommerce site, according to a company representative. 2. Fan Marketing Ecommerce Fan marketing is selling to fans by posting from your page into their news feeds. Fans appear to be more responsive when acquired through ads than through contests, content or legacy. Data analysis in 2011 from companies like PageLever revealed that many multimillion-fan brand pages were reaching 7% or fewer of their fans. Some pages have hundreds of thousands of fans who never liked or commented on a post, and have not seen the page's posts for years. Success with fan marketing requires that you be as visible as possible to your fans, and EdgeRank has a time decay factor. New fans may be required in some cases. Some businesses have taken the radical step to start entirely new pages and use Facebook ads to grow a new and more targeted fan base. With their more sophisticated and up-to-date understanding of how to engage fans, they achieve better results than they had with their old page. Some profitable examples include Baseball Roses, Rosehall Kennel, WUSLU and SuperHeroStuff. Baseball Roses sells artificial roses made from real baseballs. Founder of the company, Mark Ellingson, explained that they were unsuccessful with Google AdWords because no one was searching for their innovative product. They achieved a 473% ROI from their spend on fan acquisition via Facebook ads. Rosehall Kennel breeds and sells German Shepherds, and has achieved more than 4,000% ROI on its fan acquisition spend, according to owner Eliot Roberts. What's more, they have seen fewer requests for discounts and a shorter sales cycle. WUSLU is a Woot-like site for home decor. While the company would not release exact profitability numbers, they are excited about their Facebook marketing results and have no plans to stop. SuperHeroStuff.com's founder Ronando Long told me that when the company began to use Facebook in 2011, it was the only new thing they were doing, and their revenues increased 150%. 3. Facebook Ads and Email Many companies already have email dialed in. They know how much the average email subscriber is worth to their company, and they have an email marketing process that's profitable. For these companies, whether they initiate fan marketing or not, it makes sense to use Facebook ads to acquire even more subscribers, as long as those subscribers are qualified. Facebook advertising can be targeted according to 16 different criteria, including age, gender, interests, location, relationship status, connection to pages you admin, workplace, education level, majors in college and more. Add to that some ad copy that calls out the people you want to target, and you can ensure these new subscribers are qualified. By sending contest-based email campaigns integrated with social networking, one Fortune 500 company achieved a 400% increase in email open rate, click rates of 14%, and one-fifth of their email subscribers also became fans, according to Steve Gaither, president of JB Chicago, the marketing agency that worked with the company. 4. Facebook Ads and Text Messaging Businesses haven't rushed to adopt SMS marketing, but 24% of mobile marketers have found their campaign ROI met or exceeded their expectations, and 4% of all mobile users have responded to a coupon for a product or service. One local store (from a popular fast food franchise I'm not allowed to name) boosted revenue with this approach. It posted information about free text message coupons to its Facebook fans. Fans who opted in received an SMS coupon every day for 30 days. The result was $65,000 additional store revenue. 5. Generating Traffic to Your Ad-Supported Site If you're a publisher or blogger, content is your stock in trade, and advertising is usually your bread and butter. Why not create a Facebook page for your site, grow that fan base, then post a link to every new article? This boosts traffic to your website. Since your advertising revenue is tied to pageviews, more traffic from new readers and repeat traffic from fans mean more advertising revenues for your website. Proud Single Moms, which created a Facebook page, grew about 98,000 fans via Facebook ads for less than $5,000, according to the site's creator. Since the website uses AdSense ads, they chose to blog on topics that not only were interesting to moms, but which also had Google keywords generating high click fees. You can use a combination of the Facebook advertising platform and AdWords' Keyword Tool to find interesting and profitable topics. Then they posted links to their blog posts on Facebook each day. Proud Single Moms was on track to break even on its initial ad investment within six months, and was privately sold to another party. Which Revenue Model Should You Choose? If one of these models isn't an obvious match for your business, I'd recommend you first test direct Facebook ads to whatever is already working for your business. Do you have products or services that already sell well? Use Facebook ads to send more traffic to them. Fans can also be affordably acquired through Facebook ads, but make sure you understand the amount of time and creativity required for fan marketing before you start. Companies that jump into fan marketing without that understanding and a good plan usually post in a way that doesn't lead to much interaction. Then, EdgeRank reduces the reach and value of your Facebook page. Overall, the ROI of your efforts becomes low or negative. But when you get the right fans from Facebook ads and engage them with interesting content, profits often follow. |
| Apple's Offshore Accounts Could Double its Cash by 2014 | | Thursday, January 12, 2012 8:44 PM | Kate Freeman |
|  Apple is on track to making an even more astronomical amount of dough with its offshore accounts. The Cupertino, Calif.-based company has most of its money in overseas investments -- $54 billion of its $85 billion in cash is kept out of the United States, according to a story on investment website SeekingAlpha. By 2014, it is estimated, Apple could have $150 billion. The SeekingAlpha story speculates that Apple's offshore accounts will continue to appreciate because of the booming overseas' economies in which the cash is invested. The money is in yen, real and euros. If Apple wants to move that cash stateside, they'll have to pay a hefty American corporate tax rate. Fortune reported last year that Apple lobbied for a one-year break from repatriation in an effort dubbed the "Win America Campaign," with the aim of bringing offshore corporate reserves back to the U.S. at a discounted rate. The possibility that corporations could pay a lower tax rate than civilians caused a hubbub and resulted in protests. Last summer the group US Uncut demanded Apple "leave the tax cheat lobbying group and stop lobbying Congress for more tax loopholes." Apple later backed out of the campaign. The U.S. corporate tax rate is around 35%, one of the highest in the world. But few business pay the full 35% -- due to loopholes in the tax code. Some companies, such as GE, paid no federal taxes in 2010; GE claimed a $3.2 billion tax benefit. Some companies even pay a negative tax rate -- meaning the government is paying them to operate here. In fact, the tax rate in the United States is lower now than it was in the 1980s for many large corporations In 1986, the corporate tax rate for businesses earning more than $1,405,000 was a flat 46%. We reached out to Apple to ask if they have considered moving more of their operation overseas, and what its response is to those who criticize its push to bring their overseas investments back to the U.S. at a lower tax rate. But what do you think about the way Apple run its business? Tell us in the comments. |
| Enter the Google Maps Labyrinth [VIDEO] | | Thursday, January 12, 2012 5:22 PM | Todd Wasserman |
|  Google Maps gets the low-tech treatment in a new ad that imagines the app as the classic Labyrinth game. The online video spot, the first for Google from San Francisco ad agency Venables Bell & Partners, uses a wooden gyroscopic structure to help two players navigate a blue ball. The camera follows the ball as it discovers restaurants, checks into a barbershop and then, finally, goes bowling. The video was timed to coincide with CES and highlights capabilities on Google Maps like indoor maps, the ability to rate restaurants, create custom maps in Mapmaker and view traffic. A very similar animated video created by another agency, B-Reel, is designed to promote a game for Google Maps that's expected to hit Google+ Games next month. Google appears to have a soft spot for the concept of rendering its products in analog form. Early ads for the company's Chrome browser took a similar approach. In the ad featured below, for instance, cardboard webpages are changed using a metal cylinder, activated by the swing of a hammer. |
| 3 Major Concerns for Brands Over ICANN's New Domain Registry Options | | Thursday, January 12, 2012 4:39 PM | Jeff Ernst |
|  Jeff Ernst is a principal analyst at Forrester Research, serving CMOs and marketing leaders. One thing's for sure: ICANN's gTLD program is a game-changer. The introduction of new .brand and .category gTLDs represents the biggest change to the Internet naming system since, well, since we've had websites. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) opens the application window today, Jan. 12, and will run registration through Apr. 12, so company leaders need to decide whether they'll apply, at a cost of $185,000 per generic top-level domain (gTLD), plus application and infrastructure costs that could dwarf that. But that's where the certainty ends. I've advised over 50 companies not to look at this defensively, but to evaluate the strategic opportunities made available by owning a registry. Some see this as the greatest opportunity to take control of their online identities. Others have heard the opposition from organizations like the Association of National Advertisers, and predict disastrous consequences if this program is implemented. Most are just confused. Where's the truth? Well, let's look at a few of the biggest questions and concerns that brand owners have raised, and predict the most likely scenarios for how they will play out. 1. Concern: If I Don't Apply, Someone Else Can Get My Brand Name. This is true. ICANN has procedures to protect trademark holders from infringement, but the process doesn't guarantee that another organization can't get your string. If you don't apply, the onus is on you to review the applications on the ICANN site after the window closes to see if anyone has applied for a string that is or contains your name. Assuming you have legal rights to the name, you can file a legal rights objection. The court will consider certain factors that will be open for interpretation, but I believe that: If you have trademark rights to your name and the organization applying for your name does not, you will prevail in an objection and prevent the other applicant from winning your string. If the applicant has trademark rights for the same term in another sector, you'll need to prove that the applicant's intended use of the gTLD will cause harm to your brand, which will be difficult to do and you likely won't prevail. Let's say Delta Airlines and Delta Faucet hold similar marks on Delta within their industries. If only one applies for .delta, the other would have a hard time proving harm. 2. Concern: I'll Have to Spend Millions to Defend My Brands from Cybersquatters. This one doesn't add up. I don't see a huge risk of cybersquatting on top-level domains, or on second-level domains within the new TLDs because: Cybersquatters won't vie for top-level domains. A cybersquatter with no trademark rights would be absolutely foolish to apply for your brand name, because the probability of being awarded the gTLD is next to zero. The perpetrator would have to go through the extensive process of completing the application, in which they describe in detail how they intend to use the registry, prevail against any objections, and pass all of ICANN's technical and financial requirements. Also, there is no secondary market for gTLDs, so a cybersquatter would have no way to extort money out of you to buy it from them. Rights holders have first crack at second-level domains. Each new gTLD is required to have a "sunrise period," which provides trademark and brand holders the first rights to register their brands as a second-level domain within the gTLD before it opens to general registration. Brand owners need to evaluate the new gTLDs and determine which ones they want to be part of, which ones they want to prevent others from registering, and which don't matter. 3. Concern: If I Apply for My .Brand, am I Guaranteed to Get It? No. Several situations could arise, which must be factored into the decision to apply and manage properly. A non-applicant could object to your application. Just like you can file a legal rights objection, another company can claim that your gTLD string infringes on its trademark. Another company could apply for the same or similar string. The more generic your brand or company name, the more likely that you could also face competition for your .brand string or a similar term. When this happens, ICANN first gives the parties an opportunity to work out a resolution on their own, which we don't expect to happen, and then it will go to auction. If you expect to ever own your domain name, then the best chance of that happening is to apply now. So, put the business case together and prepare a strategic application. If you haven't identified any strategic opportunities for your firm in owning and operating a registry, then stay on the sidelines. Image courtesy of iStockphoto, PashaIgnatov |
| College Football Recruiting via Twitter? Check Out DirectSnap | | Thursday, January 12, 2012 4:20 PM | Sam Laird |
|  The bubble of American college football recruiting has few parallels in the sports universe. Millionaire coaches fervently woo teenage boys. Jobs, reputations and big-money contracts are on the line. Rabid fans pay for exclusive information from scouting services as the young players struggle to chart their futures. It has practically morphed into a separate sport unto itself, and much of the fan action takes place on Twitter. There, "recruitniks" monitor the high schoolers' feeds and then speculate, rumor-monger and gloat with other hardcore supporters. Now, a group of Southern football fans has found a way to distill the madness in one place. Their site is called DirectSnap.com. It organizes and streams tweets mentioning the nation's most-prized prospects into individual profile pages for each player as well as the teams recruiting them. Here's an example: A recruiting reporter tweets an unconfirmed rumor that a top quarterback prospect might be taking a last-minute visit to a powerhouse school. The rumor spreads across the Twittersphere. Minutes later, a random football-crazed student spots the recruit at a campus dining common eating with an assistant coach and tweets what he sees. The student's message goes out to just a small number of followers, but both tweets go directly into the quarterback's DirectSnap profile stream and to the diehard fans anticipating his final decision. Rumor confirmed. "Before, you would have had no way to put those two pieces of data together," Drew Roberts, one of DirectSnap's three 28-year-old co-founders, told Mashable. "A lot of news breaks on Twitter before it hits the recruiting sites or even the message boards, so we want to go directly to that source and organize all of it." It's a lot to organize. Last weekend, when the two top high school football All-America games were nationally televised, DirectSnap indexed more than 46,000 tweets in three days. Many players commit to college teams only to change their minds at least once before being forced to sign a binding letter-of-intent late in their senior year. Much of the online interest comes from fans living and dying by the roller coaster of a players' decision-making process. "These are 16, 17 and 18-year-olds, so they change their minds all the time," Roberts said. On Thursday morning, when news broke that a 6-foot-7 260-pound offensive lineman had switched his college commitment from Louisiana State University to Auburn University in Alabama, the player's DirectSnap profile filled with hundreds of tweets over the ensuing few hours. Players' DirectSnap profiles feature vital statistics such as height and weight, the colleges they are most commonly mentioned with and embedded highlight videos culled from YouTube. DirectSnap pulls rankings of the top 300 players in each year from the scouting sites that compile those lists. Roberts and his co-founders launched the site on Dec. 28 and drew some 70,000 visitors in its first two weeks online. Roberts said that analytics show the site's most avid users visiting multiple times per day to monitor progress and spending an average of 10 minutes on the site. But Roberts wants DirectSnap to have a wider appeal too. "What we really try to do is also make it accessible for casual fans who can just go to a team to page to get a good glance at what players are getting talked about with regard to their team," he said. Roberts and his co-founders are funding DirectSnap themselves, in part using money from a popular college football blog called Saturday Down South that they started last summer. DirectSnap is monetized solely through on-site ads, although Roberts said that they would be interested in exploring partnerships with larger recruiting and sports sites as they gain more traction. They're working on a DirectSnap mobile app and also plan to start a similar site for college basketball recruiting. One lesson Roberts and company have learned since launch: Don't include tweets from the recruits themselves. They experimented with that in an earlier stage, but found the streams bogged down by typical teenage tweets about girls, parties and homeroom. But, no matter; DirectSnap's masses of football-mad Twitter users solve the problem for them. "Anytime a recruit does something of actual importance to their decision process, the fans jump all over it," Roberts said. "So everything important gets picked up by everyone else." Would you use a site like this? What do you think about the online craziness that surrounds college football recruiting? Let us know in the comments. Image courtesy of iStockphoto, LUGO |
| Bing Overtakes Yahoo as the Number Two Search Engine [STUDY] | | Thursday, January 12, 2012 3:25 PM | Todd Wasserman |
|  Microsoft's Bing overtook Yahoo in market share in December for the first time, making Bing the number two search engine next to Google, according to comScore. The researcher found that Bing's rise that month, to 15.1%, was due mostly to a 0.6% drop in Yahoo's market share. The rankings come after Bing tied Yahoo in November. Nevertheless, it's cause for celebration among the team behind the three-year-old search engine at Microsoft, which powers Yahoo search. Last year at this time, Bing's share was 12% vs. 16% for Yahoo. Bing's growth is a reflection of Microsoft's characteristic patience -- the search engine has been a drag on earnings. However, the numbers also evince Yahoo's continuing decline. Once the number one search engine, Yahoo lost that ranking to Google in 2000. Over time, Google, which became Yahoo's default search provider that year, became as well known as Yahoo. The two parted ways in 2004. Since that time, Yahoo has seen an erosion in market share in search and has failed in its bid to reverse its fortunes despite a steady stream of would-be turnaround CEOs. (PayPal's Scott Thompson became the latest to fill that slot earlier this month.) Both Bing and Yahoo are far behind Google, of course, which commanded 65.9% of the market in comScore's latest survey. Google also grew 0.5% in December. |
| How a Professional Pain Point Led to a Disruptive Business Idea [VIDEO] | | Thursday, January 12, 2012 1:48 PM | Mashable Video |
|  Look books are the traditional, non-digital, paper catalogs that fashion designers use to show off their designs to magazine writers and editors. Fed up with the cumbersome process of having to look through every page to find the right item, Meggan Crum envisioned a website where she could just click on the items she needed via an online shopping-style web site, and have them delivered to her. She ran the idea by her colleague and good friend, Mandy Tang, who was getting her MBA at Columbia. The two then decided to found The Runthrough, a site that is shaking up the editorial side of the fashion industry. Check out our interview with Mandy and Meggan to learn how they launched using Lean Startup principles, the challenges of running a company with two co-founders and how they go their business off the ground. Thanks to Mike Brown, Jr. for hosting our shoot at AOL Ventures. Follow Venture Studio, in association with Mashable, which is brought to you by Square1 Bank. The show is hosted by Dave Lerner, a 3x entrepreneur and angel investor. To join Venture Studio's Facebook page, click here. More Recent Episodes of Venture Studio: How a Niche Email Newsletter Grew to a Million Subscribers/a> How 4 Business Students Took on the Eyewear Industry How a Handful of Small Investors Built Silicon Valley/a> |
| Top 10 Self-Published Writers Make 449% More Money Through Amazon Lending Library | | Thursday, January 12, 2012 1:02 PM | Lauren Indvik |
|  Amazon released some strong revenue numbers Thursday around KDP Select, its lending library program for self-published authors. The data, released in effort to ward off uncertainty about the program, suggest that KDP Select is generating some serious revenue for some bestsellers, but offer few details about its benefits for the vast majority of participants. KDP Select is a lending program that encourages self-published authors and publishers to make their work available exclusively in the Kindle Store for 90-day periods. It also makes their works freely available to borrow by Kindle users for at least five of those 90 days. Those who agree to both terms are eligible to take part in a $6 million annual royalty fund, which pays dividends based on each author's share of total borrows during that month. An author only earns revenue if one of his or her books is borrowed. As Laura Hazard Owen of PaidContent pointed out at the time of the program's launch, KDP Select offers some obvious benefits -- namely, increased exposure -- but also has some significant drawbacks. The exclusivity clause prevents many would-be lenders from selling their books through other vendors with self-publishing programs, such as Barnes & Noble and Smashwords. There's also no guarantee will make much, if any, money from the program. In the statement sent out Thursday, Amazon disclosed that there are now more than 75,000 books in the Kindle Lending Library. Customers, who must possess both a Kindle device and Amazon Prime membership to borrow a book, borrowed books 295,000 times in December. Authors earned $1.70 per borrow from a $500,000 fund. The top 10 authors earned an average of $7,000 each in royalties. Most promising was the sales boost many authors received as a consequence of adding their books to KDP Select. The top 10 authors in the program saw a 30% increase in royalties received from sales of their books over the period. Including their earnings from the loan fund, their earnings from Amazon were up 449% on average from November. One of the top 10 earners, paranormal romance writer Carolyn McCray, said that participating in KDP Select quadrupled her royalties. She earned $8,250 from the lending program alone plus, presumably, a bonus in paid sales. "To say the trade-off of exclusivity on Amazon for the Kindle Owners' Lending Library has been a profitable one would be a gross understatement," she gushed. Those are strong numbers, but they leave many questions. Just how many of those 75,000 books available to borrow are from self-published authors? Books were borrowed 295,000 times, but how many individual books were borrowed? How many were borrowed once, or not at all? We know the top 10 authors made some serious cash, but what was the median amount made? How many authors made nothing? We've asked Amazon the same questions. We're not expecting explicit answers, but we'll post them if we get them. |
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