Open Salon Is Now Open and Poses a Lot of Questions (First Look)

This morning a new initiative from Salon magazine debuts - it is called Open Salon and is based on a very peculiar idea to reward users that has made some bloggers doubt its future. Mathew Ingram reports today that for some time now the site has been building a hosted blogs network and recruited over 1,300 blogs in the private beta stage.

What Salon is debuting today is basically a hosted blog network that aggregates the best content from participating blogs to the homepage for a better accessibility. Visitors of the blogs can rate every story and thus recommend it to be promoted higher to eventually get to the “Top Rated” section of the Open Salon page and hopefully get even more visibility by making it to the main page of the online magazine itself.

What is interesting to me in the entire story is that Salon will be experimenting with getting bloggers in by offering them a compensation scheme: their readers will be able to send donations (tips) to the bloggers if they like the content these bloggers create. Every blogger on the site owns a “tip jar” (Tippem) that can be filled with donations from readers. The donations are processed by Revolution Money Exchange. It is known that this latest alternative to PayPal has an interesting approach to luring people in: in addition to offering the majority of services for free, it also adds $25 credits to new accounts and has a referral system that pays $10 for every recruited new member. I am not sure if this system is still in place but what I see on Open Salon definitely looks like they are going to use the referral bonuses they receive from Revolution Money Exchange to provide their users with the initial $10 to start playing and paying.

I have registered with Open Salon out of curiosity and found this to be a pretty blogger-friendly community where a new blog is dead-simple to set up and start publishing. What a blogger basically gets here is a blog platform (for free), hosting (equally free), social network to communicate with other bloggers, and opportunities for promotion and monetization as well. In addition to the publishing platform with a built-in audience (as they put it themselves), Open Salon also offers a blogger some editorial guidance because every day the editors send open calls for content showing bloggers what exactly has better chances of being picked by an editor for extra visibility.

This approach seems to be a pretty fair one since unlike other blog networks that offer revenue sharing for blog monetization, here actually everything your readers are willing to send you will end in your pockets while the company will support itself by advertising on the main page of the magazine (I have not seen any ads on the Open Salon page itself or on some blogs I browsed).

But if you actually think about it for a while advertising seems like a guaranteed revenue stream while no one can be sure about donations. Just ask yourself a question: have you ever sent a donation to a blogger or a software developer if a service is free and you are just offered to make a donation out of your own free will. Even if you answer yes here, the majority of internet users invariably prefer not to pay whenever they can avoid it. And while the initial $10 will most certainly be used to reward some content here, when the users are out of this amount they will have to use their own money and I really doubt many people will bother to send such donations even to their most favorite bloggers.

Another problem is that Revolution Money Exchange only allows US residents in (at least for now) so the blogging community will only be able to tip US bloggers as well while bloggers from other countries end up without any chances to tip others or be rewarded themselves.

To summarize it all, while Open Salon does offer a unique and rather fresh approach to blogging for dollars (and for visibility as well), I think it will only work for amateurs who are not particularly serious about blogging. While the bloggers that already know how to produce good content and monetize it will feel perfectly fine on their own blogs with their own ads (and even donation widgets as well) or maybe on Google’a Blogger where they can earn money every time their reader click ads (and clicking does not cost anything to the reader which is a big advantage) which still sounds more realistic than expecting someone to pay you simply because they like your content.

UPDATE. Full disclosure: Profy also offers a hosted blogging platform to member of private beta testing process which may be viewed as a competitor to Open Salon.