Production Push: Self-Service Publishing Now Live

Last night (for the first time), outside users could sign up at www.bitmenu.com and publish on their own.

Depending on file sizes and upload speeds, it took less than an hour for some users to get setup, supply their content, connect to their payments account and receive simple links to their files that require payment before download.

Each link we create ensures payment before a download is authorized, our plug-in manages most file transfers, and our reporting itemizes each sale and identifies each buyer to publishers.

For us, this has been a long process of inspiration, review and iteration.

We recognize that our publishing interfaces are not slick, but they work. We have already produced thousands of Bitmenu links on behalf of our publishers. As we watch users create their own links, we'll have the best possible data on which to refine our systems.

Please consider Bitmenu "open for business", get started, and let us know how it goes. We will be right there with you to answer questions and help anyway we can.

Enhanced eBook for iPad: The Universal Language

Author Wolf Price impressed us with his latest project: an album of recordings made during 11 months of travel through Asia with his wife, Ada. Wolf used studio-quality recording equipment to produce an album of the indigenous folk music they encountered. Richly illustrated with photos and text, the music in this album is put into the eye-opening context of their adventure.

When it came time to package his experience, as an artist, Wolf could not leave the music outside the book or feature the pictures apart from the music. He needed a way to present his experience in an integrated way. He chose to create a .zip archive containing 14 mp3 audios along with a 19 page PDF album book. Buyers of this format can conveniently move the audio files to their iPods for easy listening.

As we reviewed the material, we were struck by the engaging photography contained in the album book and how the images bring out the personality of the music. Wolf enthusiastically supported our idea of creating an enhanced ePub for iPad users. This 19 page album book, with its dramatic photos, has individual audio tracks embedded with the text such that the story of the adventure comes to life.

From our perspective, both versions successfully deliver the listener/reader into the sights as well as the sounds of rural life in the cultures of Mongolia, Thailand, Nepal, and India. However, the iPad epub version brings the printed text and music together in an effortless manner for a richer learning and entertainment experience than can be achieved by merely reproducing books or music alone.

Links:

The Universal Language: Indigenous Asia
The Universal Language: Indigenous Asia, iPad ebook edition
Youtube trailer

And our own video showing off the iPad version:

Share it, or perish

An interesting aspect of working with publishers is seeing what works well, not so well, or doesn't work at all. At the top of list of what works: active sharing, promoting, posting, tweeting, or otherwise getting the word out through all electronic means so others pick up on it. There is a certain relentless nature to the most successful Bitmenu publishers. They continually refresh their offerings and find ways to be newsworthy, re-tweetable, and like-able. After all, connecting comes before sharing.

Successful Bitmenu publishers commit to a production plan, regular announcements and new product. We see these publishers reap the benefits of executing ongoing production and promotion schedules to build an effective rhythm with their communities. Successful promotions see a sales curve that hits within a few minutes of the first announcement, with several mini-spikes of sales as buyers discover the offer through their regular news-reading, friends and searches. This chart of "Sales (Hourly) After Promo" is from one publisher's mid-December campaign.

This Bitmenu publisher noted that their community consumes media mostly on the weekends and evenings. Being mostly North American based, the publisher did some A/B testing and found that early Friday afternoon email broadcasts were their most effective promotion. An email blast that costs $100 per promotion now generates thousands of dollars in revenue each week. Items promoted on Friday see increased sales levels throughout the weekend and even into the week after the announcement. The members of their community, who have opted-in to receive emails, often look at every notice they is sent and make purchases after careful consideration.

The old saying "a high tide lifts all boats" also applies here. Propagation across the community takes a few hours, but once it gains momentum, it can go for a few days. In another example after a sports event, sales of race videos peaked a day after they were announced via Twitter and the publisher's web site. In this chart (left), sales peaked at over 100 in a day, then slowly tapered off.

We often see a flurry of purchases for a featured item, but just as often we also see other items purchased at the same time even if they were not directly promoted. Enabling several purchase points seems to make a difference. Publishers who mix links to their site with links to a featured item can measure the effects when they continue to promote on a regular schedule.

My Facebook Bio For Sale

Since October, Facebook has enabled users to download the data they have put on the service.  Today, I took advantage of this capability to make my data available for sale.

The result is a very nicely contained archive that opens in any web browser.  The posts to my wall from August, 2007 until today are intact, as well as everything I have posted:  updates, photos and videos in the resolution in which I posted them.

My friends are named in the archive.  All links within posts are intact.  You can see who a photo has been shared with.  If anyone were ever interested in seeing what comments and links I've consumed and shared, this is a great place to start.

My Facebook account has become increasingly important to me as a point of connection with my family and colleagues.  By extracting my data and making it available through a bitmenu link, I am able to share it on a "need to know" basis.  At the same time, I have restricted access to my Facebook Page to friends only. 

How could this be useful to you? 

Buying Pattern: Friends and Followers

USRowing's activities this week illustrates how one nonprofit organization uses social media to share content using Bitmenu links. The revenue they generate covers their media production costs.

This week's event was a National Selection Regatta. The winners in the featured men's and women's categories will  go the the FISA World Championships in Bled, Slovenia to represent the US in the single sculls event.

USRowing issued a series of press releases, tweets and Facebook posts to keep the press, their friends and followers up to date. All races were streamed live from the race-course, and the four featured races were then made available for sale and download via Bitmenu at 7:30am the day following the racing.

USRowing issued its first press release  two days prior to the event and included a link to where the featured races would be made available for sale once the event had concluded. The fact that all events were streamed live from the race course doesn't seem to reduce demand for their post-event videos at all. With the release available on www.usrowing.org, the tweets and posts started with simple links to the notice.

As the racing progressed throughout the event, including delays and re-scheduling due to weather, @USRowing issued no less than 62 tweets to their 2,442 followers and 11 Facebook posts to their 12,500 friends. Just ten hours after the completion of racing was announced, USRowing's bitmenu links were posted to their web site and announced on both social media platforms at 7:30am (eastern) this morning.

On the Bitmenu service side, the first USRowing sale and download occurred at 7:34am (eastern) and was followed by a steady stream of purchases throughout the day. The event videos from USRowing are so well announced to the core audience that when someone goes to purchase, we note a very low level of attrition.

Production Push: Redundancy is Repetitive

We've performed a production push this morning, adding a better-flowing website and navigation. Small changes to content tend to have a big impact on interpretation. We hope it's now much easier to understand what we do.

At the same time, our fearless compute-cloud friends at Amazon AWS have been having some major bad-times over the past 48 hours. A production-push announcement wouldn't be complete without acknowledging their current pain. We host the bitmenu.com platform on Amazon's EC2, and related services. Starting late Wednesday night we saw the lights flickering but everything seemed to continue operating fine. Then as of 1am PST Thursday morning, and for the past 48 hours, they've been in the house of pain with a major east-coast USA outage.

The key to our dodging the outage is that we're not constantly bouncing EC2 instances with EBS mount/unmount events. To do so is not necessarily a bad design, but may be needed in systems that repeatedly get stuck for unknown reasons. Hey, we're not built on Ruby *cough*.

We run our system on a hand-rolled AWS stack, based on bash shell with it's own failover using haproxy, polling, and cron. As such, we can do progressive production pushes across multiple machines, without customers seeing the event. Now if you are still following me, and you know what that is, then you are an old school bad ass.

In a nutshell, we didn't go out, even though we're in us-east-1, which has been suffering through the outage event. Many thanks to Vincent Jorgensen, who's keen design is proving quite solid. UPDATE: O'Reilly Media's George Reese posted his perspective on the outage one day after.

All that, and today's my birthday.

Bitmenu In the News

Thanks to Ellie Behling of eMediaVitals.com for her coverage of Bitmenu publishers and the Bitmenu story:

Single sales of digital content: one publisher's success story

eMediaVitals.com is a New York City based online publication serving print media executives who are transitioning their business to emedia.