AllThingsD » long-form

Start-Up Byliner Thinks the Digital Ink Isn't Dry on Long-Form Writing

Drake Martinet — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 17:23:16 +0000

There are at least a few of long-form writing’s elite who don’t believe the Internet is out to kill the written word. In fact, they’ve gotten together and built Byliner, a discovery platform for fans of long reads to chat about at their next wine, cheese and turtleneck party.

Byliner aims to become the new hub of authors, fans and the writing that connects them.

To do so, it has collected links and excerpts of contemporary non-fiction of greater than 1,500 words — pieces a reader could get through in a sitting or two.

Then, around the writing and associated metadata, Byliner has built a free platform for discovering other works and sharing them with people both on and off of Byliner.

“We think of it as the Pandora for writers,” said author John Tayman, Byliner’s CEO.

So far, Byliner has raised venture funding from Josh Felser of Freestyle Capital and SoftTech VC Jeff Clavier, with a recently closed $1 million seed round.

But it’s not a new model: Aggregate links provide a service on top of the stuff other people create and try to draw a user base around it. That said, it hasn’t been applied to this particular form of writing before.

With a database that now spans more than 40,000 articles, Byliner’s long-term vision is to become the hub for this type of content on the Web.

The site features the chunky fonts, shades of grey and conspicuous white space typically found in a coffee table book about design. Like those coffee table books, the site is also free of advertising.

All of Tayman’s talk of discovery and readability ultimately left open a fairly important question: How will it make money?

That’s where Byliner Originals come in, and where the funding model starts to look a little more like a regular publisher.

The Originals are written works available only through Byliner, purchasable through the site and transmitted to your device, or delivered to you on paper, for a few dollars.

Early figures on sales of the Originals seem promising. A high-profile riveting exposé by Jon Krakauer on Three Cups of Tea author Greg Mortenson sold 100,000 copies in the first two weeks in an exclusive deal with Amazon.

Byliner’s COO Ted Barnett thinks that modern devices have opened a hole in the market — and in readers’ attention spans — that is large enough to cram in one of Byliner’s exclusive works.

“Before [modern reading devices], it only made sense for someone to publish a book that took 10 hours to read,” he said. “But these devices have made the purchase and delivery of individual works of this length possible.”

Still, the site has a way to go if it wants to become a true platform.

As of today, for example, integration with the popular Read it Later service and the usual panoply of social network sharing buttons are all Byliner has mustered in the social category.

But, according to Tayman, Byliner doesn’t have to do much to be the leader.

“Short of doing some power-Googling, there is no other place to do deep cross-discovery around longer articles and writers,” he said.

He said as much, and a little more, about Byliner’s core mission during my recent visit to their HQ in San Francisco’s Presidio district:

[ See post to watch video ]

What Should We Watch After MacGyver? "Kicked in the Nuts" or "Cat Falls in Toilet"?

John Paczkowski — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 14:19:49 +0000

YouTube is finally expanding its catalog of long-form video beyond the “This video has been removed due to terms of use violation” notice that so often appears in lieu of network video content. A newly-inked deal with CBS (CBS) in hand, the video site has begun offering full-length episodes of TV series like “Dexter,” “Californication,” “MacGyver” and “Star Trek” alongside YouTube staples like “Cat Falls in Toilet” and “Kicked in the Nuts.” The shows will be presented in a new Theater View style. More importantly, they include advertising. “As we test this new format, we also want to ensure that our partners have more options when it comes to advertising on their full-length TV shows,” YouTube explained in a post to the company blog. “You may see in-stream video ads (including pre-, mid- and post-rolls) embedded in some of these episodes; this advertising format will only appear on premium content where you are most comfortable seeing such ads.”

For YouTube, which has been struggling to monetize the 330 million visitors coming its way each month, this may be the beginning of the business model that has so far eluded it. That said, the company is going to have to offer those visitors a bit more than grainy “MacGyver” reruns if it hopes to prevent them from turning to Hulu for premium long-form video content.

What Should We Watch After MacGyver? "Kicked in the Nuts" or "Cat Falls in Toilet"?

John Paczkowski — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 14:19:49 +0000