I recently conducted an email interview with Sean Callahan, President and Co-Founder of AddsYou.com, Inc., a social media publishing network that pays writers (and bloggers) for their creative work.
A technology geek, Sean is passionate about connecting people together. Shortly after meeting his girlfriend on Match.com, he moved from sunny California to London, England. In March 2008, at London’s Waterloo Station, Sean met Alex Buelau (the company’s other co-founder and chief technology officer) and they began chatting about developing a social media network to:
…bring writers (authors, bloggers, journalist, and ordinary people) together to publish and share knowledge to the masses and help them increase their exposure and visibility on an offline in addition to rewarding them for their contribution. We sketched out a plan and AddsYou.com was conceived.
The site is scheduled to launch to the public, in alpha mode, in 10 days.
What is the company’s mission?
It’s our mission to be the most visited user-generated content website on the internet contributing to the creation of a world-wide database of knowledge.
AddsYou is billed as replacing the need for a blog, forum, or wiki. Who is your targeted customer?
Our site is geared to authors. That means bloggers, novelist, journalists, students, professionals, ordinary people like me and you. We love to write and share information, knowledge if you will, to the masses. We plan on eventually creating an offering that is much more attractive than a blog, forum or wiki; something more practical and easier to use.
We developed collections for authors to use to sort their published work and present them how they want. These tools are a great way to share info with the community, build relationships with other writers. If you shared a collection on “Web 2.0 sites” or “Italian Recipes,” people could share their recipes or sites in these collections to others interested. An author merely joins the collection and can start adding items to it. For those who want to sort their info in a collection and don’t want others to contribute, authors can use personal collections. For instance, novelists could use these collections to break their books on our site into chapters.
Are authors paid? Where does the funding come from?
Yes, authors can get paid for their contribution. That means if they publish content on the site they are eligible to receive advertising revenue.
For you, you’re probably going to never stop blogging on your site, fine! Well, we’ve developed a blog importing tool for you to also publish your content on our site. This is a way for you to earn advertising revenue, but more importantly, if you choose to use our free Licensing Manager, you’ll have the ability for us to go out and market your content on and offline. That means we could get you published in print media – magazines, newspapers, journals, books, you name it!
That is where the really unique value proposition comes in. We want to be able to help people get discovered and increase their visibility unlike many of the blogging or publishings sites on the web right now.
Funding for paying writers comes from advertising, sponsorships of collections, and major media publications. The revenue an author can make from getting their work published in print media is far more substantial than any pay-per-click Google AdSense campaign they can do on their own.
Do authors retain publishing rights? How do you handle copyright/license issues?
Authors will always own all the rights to their work. Think of us as a repository of information/published works — and a marketing company. We take user-generated content and market it online and offline.
As far as copyright issues, we take cases of plagiarism seriously and have systems in place to help us track data. Users are only permitted to upload “original works” and violators will be removed from the site. We’re working on a tool that searches the web to see if content is original and then throws a flag for us to look at.
We have an Agent for Notice of Claims of copyright or other intellectual property infringement setup on our site so people can always contact us if their work is being plagiarized.
I see your “blog” is your Twitter feed @AddsYou, and that you have over 1,000 followers, not to mention buzz on Facebook. How has word of mouth spread?
We used Twitter and Facebook to find our initial group of alpha testers. We received 1,000 invitation requests in 20 days! Social media is a great way to get buzz going and to help spread word of mouth.
When it comes to word of mouth and referrals, I’m providing value. I figure if AddsYou is valuable, its users (authors) will invite their friends and family. We will launch our Alpha site in 10 days — on November 28, 2008 — and are planning on a Beta launch in early 2009. At that point, we’ll review feedback and implement site improvements, and launch a trans-Atlantic public relations campaign in both the United States and the United Kingdom.
How did you build the site architecture?
We developed our own architecture using PHP, MySQL and some AJAX here and there. There wasn’t a solution on the web that was flexible enough for us to do what we wanted to do. It’s very much like blogs, forums and wikis; they’re not that flexible. By developing our own platform, we can do anything we want with it in terms of “bells” and “whistles.”
How can readers of AriWriter sign up? Are invitations still available?
The initial 1,000 invitations have already been issued for our first release. However, I’m offering a special deal for readers of AriWriter: Visit AddsYou.com/Special to receive an invitation — but there are only 250 to give!
When the site launches at the end of next week, we need help with identifying bugs and hearing authors’ suggestions. We need help increasing authors’ visibility and exposure to fruition.
By testing the site, you’ll be able to invite more people to the site, earn points, and spend accumulated points on cool stuff to increase your visibility.
Sean Callahan, 28, is the President and Co-Founder of AddsYou.com, Inc. With over 10 years of business experience as an entrepreneur, small business owner and consultant, he previously served as President and CEO of One Lead Source, providing real estate and lending professionals comprehensive marketing and consulting services and educating clients on how to build referral-based businesses. Earlier, he directed marketing efforts for a mortgage services firm. Sean graduated California State University at San Marcos and currently studies at the London Metropolitan Business School.
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Ari Herzog is an online media strategist and Newburyport City Councilor-Elect.
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