The USA TODAY is one mainstream media company that “gets it.” Here’s an example of why:

Back in December Blogger & Podcaster Magazine teamed up with USA TODAY to launch The Blogger & Podcaster Guide (think TV Guide for blogs/podcasts to a mainstream audience). The motivation was for us both to make some money ($49.95 per month) while helping bloggers/podcasters to build their audiences by tapping into the 10,000,000+ mainstream consumer readers of USA TODAY.

After 2 months it became clear that while we had hundreds of paying customers, our $49.95 price point (a bargain by traditional USA TODAY standards) was too high for most of our industry to be able to participate.

What happened next has truly amazed me.

USA TODAY has figuratively “torn up” our original agreement and has voluntarily agreed to do the following for us:

1) Given us permission to reduce the price of from $49.95 per month to just $5 per month. They told me that they hope that this new price point will make The Blogger & Podcaster Guide accessible for everyone, no matter how niche or new to the industry. (If you’re already a customer of the guide no worries, the new pricing will happen automatically at your next billing cycle. You don’t need to do anything.)

2) Their going to help drive even more traffic into the Blogger & Podcaster Guide (beyond the franchise spot on the home page of USA TODAY.com they’ve already given us) by giving us 2,000,000 premium placed advertisements (leader boards, skyscrapers etc.) each month. That equates to just shy of 67,000 ads per day. We’re going to be all over USATODAY.com.

3) Perhaps most significantly and selfless of all, USA TODAY has given us permission to work with other media partners beyond themselves. Our agreement was originally an exclusive arrangement for them. This generous act has allowed me to already work out partnerships with 15 additional magazines/publishers with a combined audience of many more millions of pageviews per month. So now if you get a listing in the Blogger & Podcaster Guide you get The USA TODAY and ALL of the new publications for that same $5 per month rate.

I’m having conversations many other publishers and expect to add new ones to our network every month. You’ll be able to keep tabs on the complete list to date at www.bloggerandpodcaster.com/register.

When the mainstream media does something right, I think it’s important to acknowledge. Thank you USA TODAY, you’re helping the little guys, and we appreciate it.

- Larry
Publisher
Blogger & Podcaster

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 at 9:28 am and is filed under Blog Entry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.