From Editor to Entrepreneur: How BlogHer filled a void in Publishing
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This document discusses Jory Des Jardins' career path from editor to entrepreneur, including founding SheKnows Media which was committed to women inspiring women. It touches on SheKnows Media's early non-digital beginnings in print, building credibility in digital spaces, incubating startups, challenges with monetizing blogs, and lessons learned around data and content as assets.
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From Editor to Entrepreneur: How BlogHer filled a void in Publishing
- 1. Jory Des Jardins, March 2015 Who’s Paying for This? From editor to entrepreneur Jory Des Jardins, March 2015
- 2. SheKnows Media was founded with a commitment to women inspiring women. The SheKnows Media “Loop” icon is formed from one continuous line representing the feedback loop that emerges from our dynamic community as its members discover, create and share the messy, beautiful, real, and joyful moments that comprise their lives. Jory Des Jardins, March 2015
- 3. Jory Des Jardins, March 2015 Non-Digital Beginnings AKA: Print Jory Des Jardins, March 2015
- 4. Rachelswartley.com My Approach to Career The Osmosis Method Jory Des Jardins, March 2015
- 5. Building Digital Cred Step 1: Wear these glasses Jory Des Jardins, March 2015
- 6. Building Digital Cred Step 2: Work in an alley Jory Des Jardins, March 2015
- 7. Risk Analysis 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Dog Years Traditional Media Years Dog Years vs “Traditional Media” Years Jory Des Jardins, March 2015
- 8. My Startup Incubator Jory Des Jardins, March 2015
- 9. Rising from the Ashes on Market St. Jory Des Jardins, March 2015
- 10. Blogging Professionally In 2004 For the independently wealthy Jory Des Jardins, March 2015
- 11. Jory Des Jardins, March 2015 “Mommyblogging is a Radical Act.” Alice Bradley, Finslippy
- 12. BlogHer 2012 President Obama opens the conference Jory Des Jardins, March 2015
- 13. BlogHer 2005 Lisa, Elisa & Jory settle the bar bill Jory Des Jardins, March 2015
- 14. Wind at Our Backs Schoolmarms of the Internet Jory Des Jardins, March 2015
- 16. Source: Yvonne Valtierra Dial-a-blogger.org Influence in a bag Jory Des Jardins, March 2015
- 17. Jessica Brandi Lifland, The New York Times Mombloggers: #freelabor ”Hey, where’s the Lactation Lounge?” Jory Des Jardins, March 2015
- 18. Jen Rab: Flickr Will Shill for Swag Darned if you do, darned if you don’t Jory Des Jardins, March 2015
- 19. Credit: Pay Per Post To Pay or Not to Pay? Jory Des Jardins, March 2015
- 20. To Fund or Not to Fund? Jory Des Jardins, March 2015
- 21. Jory Des Jardins, March 2015 In Retrospect…
- 22. Not in My Editorial! Advertisers pay for context Jory Des Jardins, March 2015
- 23. Thinking Like a Tech Company Your data AND your content are assets! Jory Des Jardins, March 2015
- 24. What We’ll Still Do for Free Jory Des Jardins, March 2015
- 25. Source: Jessica Brandi Lifland, The New York Times Publisher-in-Chief Jory Des Jardins, March 2015
Editor's Notes
- 1. So I don’t want to bury my lead: For those of you who are familiar with BlogHer but don’t know, we were acquired in November by a company that had been largely competitive with us over the past few years: SheKnows Media. I find it interesting that, while many in women’s content are very familiar with SheKnows, I hadn’t really connected with it as a brand. I often found it through search, or through an affiliate site. But over the past two years, and especially with BlogHer in the mix, that is changing.
- 2..Here is the new SheKnows logo, which released right after the BlogHer merger. Of the many things that I liked about SheKnows when we first started talking about a merger, I appreciated that they didn’t just want our company for parts. They saw the entire value chain—great content, social sharing, live events; basically the value of caring for both the audience and the creators of the content they read. They didn’t just want our traffic—though that certainly helped to make SheKnows the largest women’s digital lifestyle play in the U.S. and Canada. They wanted the community connection, and shared our belief that not all great content can live on your Website. And yet, even an aggregator for a community needs its own voice. But at the same time, they bring to BlogHer something that we could not develop at scale because many independent publishers could not develop it at scale—video content, and resources to develop more owned content. We see room for many sources of content to exist under one umbrella, re-enforcing each other, and each serving a purpose. In some ways it feels like a return to my digital media roots, but a return in a much savvier, more powerful way. Our new direction really speaks, I think, to the way media in general is moving. Media, that is, that is going to survive today.
- 3. Transition Slide: So I got her rather circuitously, and probably in a way similar to how anyone in my work generation did—in print. I started in this business as a writer. That’s all I really wanted to be. I went to school in Illinois, and upon starting as a Freshman I rushed a sorority and sought out the University newspaper. Being a peon, I wrote a few pieces that my editor assigned to me—a feature on the paisley exhibit in Peoria, a few towns over; a book review of a title by a teenage mother that before blogging that really screwed with my Google Juice. For years before BlogHer, when you looked up my name you saw a quote: I had my son when I was 17…” It confused a lot of people. I also engendered the hatred of people by writing not always from my heart, but from that place that really loved attention, and knew that I could get it by exposing myself and other people. It was my pre-Facebook come-to-Jesus, a not-so-subtle reminder that words, when distributed in any medium, matter.
- 4. Though right out of college that changed slightly—words still did matter, but not mine. What mattered is that someone else thought your words mattered—someone else, preferably who worked at one of the big five publishing houses. I was lucky, and through friends got an internship at a major publishing house, that led to an editorial assistant job at Penguin out of college. I hoped, through association I would write, and publish, and have a lifetime supply of Penguin Classics to sustain me. The point is, my focus was always about the content. Not the business of the content. But if I hadn’t been so myopically focused on getting published I would not have been able to build a media company that championed the content creator. When I met Lisa Stone and Elisa Camahort Page, I met my business soul mates. We were all experienced in some capacity of tech and media, and we were all equally addicted to blogging.
- 5. So this is a picture of me vintage 1999. I’m not sure when it was that the business of content crept into my consciousness. Sometime, I think, back in 1999, when I moved out here from New York City for a content start-up opportunity. Back then, it wasn’t a slam dunk—Start-ups. The idea of cashing out, or even of stock options, was so foreign to me. I wish I’d known more or I might have negotiated very differently for myself. I had a very different ambition than most here. I wanted to develop great content. The technology around that was secondary, though as I was to learn it was really very important. I’d just ignominiously left iVillage (fun note: their parent company later funded mine) and was contemplating whether my next step was a sojourn to Nepal or a move across the country. I thought I was washed up—at 27—in the media world.
- 6. Through a fluke contact I ended up in San Francisco—having accepted a job as an online producer for a new site being launched by former CNNfn execs called MyPrimeTime, that was back in 1999, when someone had made the connection of Baby Boomers coming of discretionary spending age and every new company, magazine and/or Website had to cater to them and have the word “Prime” in it. This word was code for, “Not too old yet, and spends a lot of money.” Sort of what “Momblogger” would mean a few years later. But let’s not jump ahead. I accepted the job in New York on a Thursday and by Monday was on location at the construction site that is now 54 Mint, but was back then going to be our offices.
- 7. In the 2.3 years that I was with this company, or more like 17 years—as online years are like dog years—until it went under in 2002— we went from 3 to 90 emloyees; I worked at least 15 hours a day, learned basic HTML, and learned what a sys admin does (no your site doesn’t just magically appear like I thought it did at iVillage). Back when I was in book publishing, I felt like I was in a system that handed out praise for endurance. I started as and editorial assistant. One year later I haven’t done anything illegal—BOOM—I become an assistant editor. One year later BOOM—I become an associate editor. The next year BOOM, editor, and so on until it gets really crowded and I decide if I want to die here. But at my start up, I got three raises in 18 months, earned more than 50% more money than I had previously, had three promotions and found the whole idea of meritocracy to be incredibly heady. There were no boxes; no pre-defined paths to superstardom. If I showed an interest in something and no one else did I could run it. The fact that almost instantaneously it could all go away and I could also be unemployed for a year—which did happen—was beside the point. To me, both existences held risks. I learned that the risk that I preferred was the risk of trying something new and failing. Sock Puppet?
- 8. From there I knew I was stuck in digital media, and all the insecurity that would come with it. And even in 2002, when the only available digital media jobs on Craigslist were with porn sites, I still knew I wanted to be in this space. I could not envision being anywhere else. And I didn’t know it, but I was already bought into the premise behind social media of inherent meritocracy. And of the creator as publisher—something both scary, because of the potential of exposure, and yet also liberating, because we no longer had “the publishing enterprise” acting as a gatekeeper. The cream could rise in this space; provided it had quality, consistency, and community. It just needed a sustainable business model.
- 9. 2002: Feeling things out with jobs So in 2004 while at a “transitional” job and wondering if I should go back to grad school, I started a blog. It shone bright for about a month and was recognized as one of the best career blogs by Fast Company. I stumbled upon writing it while trying to get the CEO at my transitional job to start blogging. He handed me a slew of his books and said, “pull from here.” It seemed to me that there was a lot of room to grow in this medium.
- 10. But it was going to take a while. Even as my blog grew in popularity, I could not get a decent book deal to save my life. Perhaps it started with my book agent, who asked me, why would anyone want to read what you’ve already written online? She—many—didn’t yet understand the concept of blog as platform. I remember, while writing my book proposal, having to mention the blog, as it was a potential marketing mechanism, but not actually associating my book with what you might read on it. That stuff, according to the market, was free content, not something you would plunk down money for in a paperback. And those “traditional” writers, those that didn’t write for free, didn’t write blogs. As one professional author (OK, my twin sister) said to me back then, “Why would I just give my work away?” She wasn’t crazy. But I felt that this in itself was a travesty, knowing how hard I worked on my content. How hard other bloggers worked on their sites. Why shouldn’t we get paid for our work? I ended up getting the book contract. It wasn’t for anything near the amount of money I could live on. But it was a good publishing house. It was the start to the writing career I had been wanting. But I turned it down. I had met two women who had this cockamamie idea of holding a conference for women bloggers that I’d helped, and I realized that there was a much bigger opportunity. I chose, instead, to take the next 18 months working 15 hours a day for no pay, to see how it would go.
- 11. This is a quote from a blogger who stood up at the first BlogHer Conference in 2005. It sounds rather self-justifying now, but when this woman first said it in front of 300 women it was mind blowing. Even we—me and my co-founders, Elisa Camahort Page, and Lisa Stone—hadn’t realized what an opportunity it would be for this and other communities of women who weren’t on the “Technorati 100”. I’d met Elisa just a few months before at a blogging conference. We were the only women in the room who were not typing our notes—how ironic—and we saw each other and immediately connected. She had just met Lisa a few weeks before, and Lisa had been wanting to create an event for women bloggers, as the conversations in the media were often around “Where are the women bloggers?” It seemed like a stupid question to us—after all, we were women bloggers. So Lisa and Elisa wanted to show the answer by creating an event for women bloggers to network and learn from each other. “Sounds great,” I said. “Let me know when you’re up and running. I’d love to help.” A few weeks later I checked in with Elisa, who still hadn’t found a place to hold the conference, but she and Lisa were still planning on a full day event for 300 with food and ample Web connection. I’d had some experience selling event sponsorships in one of my post-boom career iterations and asked about sponsorship and registration fees. “Wait,” I asked, “Who’s paying for this?” This question would define my role at the company for the next 10 years.
- 12. So I like to talk about this part of the business, like when President Obama welcomed 5,000 of our attendees in New York City—smart for a presidential candidate to do, I think. And a sign of the acknowledgement of our community as critical to defining the direction of our country, but actually this picture is probably more of an accurate depiction of the journey…
- 13.Here’s Lisa, Elisa and I at BlogHer’05, counting the cash we collected at the door of our first opening party, making sure we had enough to pay our bar tab. That year we plunked down a deposit at the Tech Mart on our credit cards for a day-long event. We stuffed our own badges, stupidly, at 6am that morning and weren’t yet done when the first attendees arrived. I ran around with Cat-5 cables, attempting to right complaints about the shitty Web connection. We’d sat down with all of our speakers and primed them on how to keep the conversation open and civil. The next day, my voice was gone. I hadn’t slept for days and felt sick. But I was charged with this heady feeling, despite being called out by a nasty panelist online, despite choking on my gum during my panel with Dooce and nearly falling off the stage, I realized that we’d done something. We put something on the map and like it or not I was going to play a role. All of this felt scary and right. We knew we had a tiger by the tail. And brands were contacting us to ask how they could get in on the community we had developed. The joke was, it was already there; we just were the first to give it a public voice. Now if only this blogging thing could have a model
- 14. From there things moved really quickly. We’d put a stake in the ground, and they came to us—brands, press, and bloggers—to help sort out this new space. Perpetuators of Church & State—Lisa called us the School Marms of the Internet I became our evangelist to the brand side, which felt like falling off a log for me. It was usually just an exercise in editorial common sense. And yet we were looked upon for direction and best practices. Thing is, we knew we had a community on our hands, and a possible business, but I don’t think we yet fully backed it into a company. We hadn’t yet fundraised, we’d just decided to quit our independent consulting. And perhaps our lack of direction was reflected in the marketplace.
- 15. We were in a position of strength, but it was not without its challenges. And misperceptions Source: blogs.mccombs.utexas.edu
- 16. like we were the nonprofit of this burgeoning space. People thought we were like a momblogger drive-through: I’d check my email and inevitably I’d see a slew of requests: I’ll take two endorsements, a review, and a Tweet please. I’d like two craftbloggers from Texas to come to my store opening…” Some people thought that they needed to pitch me, or Elisa, or Lisa, and we would convince everyone else to like something. If only they knew. The three of us never endorsed anything, ever. I still get pitched like a blogger, some 20 or so times a day. Credit: Yvonne Valtierra
- 17. And for some reason, despite the fact that only one of us even was a mom at the time, and she was a news journalist—we were “Those Mombloggers.” This, of course, was a slight to the 40% of our community who did not identify as a momblogger. In fact, our largest community from an audience standpoint is food. And combined with that assumption was the assumption that mombloggers were just hobbyists doing this for fun, to connect with other moms, and were just spenders, not earners. What bothered me most about this assumption is that it was anathema to a critical component of our mission-- to help women gain community, education, exposure AND economic growth if that’s what she wanted. The thought of asking women to do “free” anything was a violation of that. We feel that as part of our work we made it OK to get paid to write and be recognized financially for their influence. Credit: Jessica Brandi Lifland, The New York Times
- 18. Put this one in the “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t” column: We had an internal challenge within our community that heated up during our second annual conference in 2006 when we’d had our first real experience with SWAG that year. Brands had come and were eager to get their low-calorie bars, their “skinny water” and their condoms into the hands of bloggers. While the Founders any many attendees were grateful for the sponsorship, some women in the community felt pandered to. Embarrassed. Disrespected. That someone could just hand them some chocolate and expect a nice write up. It was after this conference that we realized, we had coalesced a community, enforced editorial standards and rules of engagement for brands, but we needed to do this work on the other side. We needed to enable women who were seeking sponsorship to do so without impunity from others. We needed to enable women who didn’t want to interact with brands with a path. We needed to emphasize the need for choice to engage or not engage with brands. Credit Jen_Rab (Flickr)
- 19. The marketing world was wrestling with the social media thing and unclear where to budget it. Was representation—advertising or otherwise—on a blog PAID media, or EARNED media? Depending on the agency—and how they got paid—you got a different answer. Some people took social to mean “popular” and insisted on rewarding content providers by the traffic they generated. We insisted on a CPM model, which in essence paid for the privilege of being on a site, not for performance. And yet, there were some models that paid purely on inclusion of brand mention, or click performance—Remember, Pay Per Post (now Izea?), Nick Denton’s early experiments of paying bloggers by the page views they generated? And yet if that model had prevailed, our current sites might look very different today. No ability to show up on ComScore. We didn’t speak the language of scale. Others in the space were trying to coalesce into advertising networks, something we felt we could do better than anyone.
- 20. And, on a personal note we needed to raise a round of funding quickly, or our own rents, mortgages, and childcare would go unpaid. We had an unsustainable situation. And while I will not speak for Elisa or Lisa, I will say that at this time, in 2007. I had my first, “What the fuck am I doing?” moment. Post-existential crisis, and post-funding, I would get used to this feeling. And a new concern would emerge—would we be perceived as profiting off of our work empowering women? After years of silently asking myself this question, I came to an answer fairly recently: What difference does it make? We did what we sought to do. We’ve premised our business on the notion that people should make money doing what they love. Why not us?
- 21. We had our ups and downs I believe we impacted publishing for the better. But we didn’t get everything right. Brands looked to us to set rules so we set them, creating a church and state between brand and content, and even working closely with the FTC on developing best practices around disclosure—practices no one would question today. And I’m really proud of that. But, we also realized that even as we had to protect content’s credibility, we needed to allow brands to show up, even to integrate with content. To partner with bloggers. We made some assumptions about our audience back then that have since been proven inaccurate, maybe even wrong.
- 22. We assumed that we would never monetize the editorial well. We took our print backgrounds and experience with ASME guidelines as far as it would take us, but now, with a new dimension of social now added to this not-so-new digital medium, even those rules have changed. And context has been newly defined. As we can see, brands can be part of the editorial well. Even ads can help define an editorial experience. We taught bloggers and brands about separation and disclosure, and now we’re teaching them about co-creation.
- 23. We initially thought that earned media outcomes were a nice to have—indeed, a likely to have—but never guaranteed. Guaranteeing earned media, we argued, was tantamount to paying bloggers for endorsements. But then, earned media wasn’t that measureable back in 2007. It still is tough to measure, but now there has been enough budget spent, bloggers engaged and data captured that we can start to make some educated guesses—even assumptions—on the social impact of a campaign. This is a glimpse of a dashboard we developed for ourselves and our clients last year. It helps us track and optimize paid and earned media campaigns, and it even helps us to predict social media outcomes. We never thought of ourselves as a technology company, but that changed, Now media companies are data and technology companies.
- 24. We thought that allowing all technology to live off of our own site would be an advantage, and indeed it was for us to achieve the scale we have; we allowed bloggers to keep their domains. We got this half-right, I think. In the venture world, your owned media and your tech IP are what matter. We wrote the book on how to make influence scale, and I think brands, agencies, and publishers are still trying to figure this out—this secret sauce. But we needed to take more ownership of this process. Indeed, it’s a lesson for any entrepreneur building technology meant to disintermediate: the degree to which you take back your tech, the data you collect, the market you enable. Along those lines, we thought that publisher models that didn’t pay for content—only paid through exposure would not last. Again, we were half right. I still think that this one is playing out. So long as we have a supply chain of content creators who see value in the exposure, this model will survive. But the more empowered these content creators become, the more they will question, why am I helping you make money. And the more empowered they are to strike out on their own.
- 25. We didn’t’ get everything right, but I still believe in the same principles that I did when we started BlogHer: that the cream always rises. But today the cream has a longer journey to the top. Quality still matters Quantity still matters, though still not as much as quality. And agility matters; our ability to play on multiple platforms, and to be enough of a connoisseur of our community to know how they consume our content. Ultimately I think where our presence will be most felt is with the publisher, and the underlying belief in her as a business entity, a creator and manager of her own brand, an entrepreneur, and a CEO in charge of her digital identity. Jessica Brandi Lifland, NYT