Media Philanthropy Update: Two offers are in, and their NOT from media companies!

1. Michael Wolf wrote a great piece on my Media Philanthropy proposal: http://www.newser.com/off-the-grid/post/353/how-much-is-this-post-worth.html

2. Original media philanthropy post at my blog: http://bit.ly/8Vql8G

3. Two marketing firms (think PR/advertising) have offered to send a $10k check to charity for the 10 newsletter ASAP. They totally get the value of having buzz/techmeme/SEO-juicy posts. 

4. Not one publisher (including TechCrunch, Business Insider, WSJ, NYT, AllThingsD, gigaom) has made an offer for the newsletter... some have reached out for a lower price point. I find this insane since my newsletters gets 25+ inbound links and 50-250k page views in the first 10 days of publishing. At a modest $5 to $10 RPM these newsletters would breakeven instantly and get a ton of SEO juice and buzz. I know for a fact that the publications I've listed above have a $5-15 RPM so I'm left with the conclusion that a) people don't want to set a precedent or b) no one wants to be associate with my unique brand of pot stirring. I don't take it personal... really. :-) 

5. Congrats to the Huffington Post team at doing such a good job of getting people to publish for free that the written word is now worthless! I kid, I kid. Gotta love how everyone at Huffington Post gets paid big salaries but writers. Joking, joking... I kid. If I succeed at getting $1,000 a piece donated to charity I'm sure that some percentage of the top 25 Huffington Post authors would say "I want Huffington Post to donate $1,000 to charity in order to publish my work." In fact, a great model to compete with Huffington post would be for a publisher to offer the celebrity columnists a donation to their charities for their work.... if I was Saul Hansell at AOL I would go right down the list of top Huffington Post authors and make that offer. If I was Huffington Post I would  offer something to the celebrity writers. 

All that being said, kudos for Huffington Post to pulling off the Tom Sawyer "painting this fence is so much fun you should give me your apple for the privilege to do so" strategy of the media century! 

best j  
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Jason McCabe Calacanis
CEO, http://www.Mahalo.com
Blog: http://www.calacanis.com
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