After a lot of discussion among all at Scoopt and, not least on the blogs talking about us and with us, we have decided to drop the 50% initial ScooptWords fee for words. The fee is now set at 25% and will remain at that level until we begin to see a clear picture of where the market is and what it needs. With the first official press release out in the wild, it's great that we have been able to incorporate your thoughts at such a very early stage in our development. So please, keep chatting away about the service on your blog. We try to pick up on conversations as they happen using a combination of Google Alerts, Technorati, Sphere custom feeds and co.mments. After much debate in the comments on various blogs, Scoopt MD Kyle announced the reduction in the ScooptWords cut in the comments at Problogger - before we mentioned it anywhere else. We're already making sales in beta mode - which is far earlier than we expected. And clearly that's great news for you and us.
Cash from content
The fundamental idea behind ScooptWords is that some bloggers produce content every bit as good (often better) than newspapers and magazines. For bloggers who quite fancies being featured in the press and editors who fancy running blog content in their publication, there's no easy method. ScooptWords bridges this gulf. Bloggers can sell their words,
editors can buy them. We take care of the donkeywork. That's about as complicated as it gets.
The sign up process (I think) is reasonably quick and easy. We've set it up so that ScooptWords members also become members of Scoopt - that way they also have a chance of selling newsworthy photos along with words. Once signed up, the blogger adds a piece of html code to their blog, or up to five blogs. This creates a button that editors can click on to buy content.
We're experimenting with various buttons and wording at the moment. You can see a couple of prototype ideas above. We hope to have three or four variants, both small and medium. Not sure either of the buttons in this post will make the final cut :)
