Interview with Jeremy Wright, CEO, b5media

Earlier this week, b5media announced they have received a round of financing totalling $2 million dollars. I wanted to find out more about the service and if it can benefit you. Below is a brief interview I conducted with the CEO of b5media, Jeremy Wright.

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Click the start button below to begin the audio interview (or download the mp3):

Below is a partial text transcript of the audio interview. Please listen to the audio for the entire discussion.

Allen: Can you provide a brief bio on yourself?
Jeremy: I am the CEO of b5media which is a new media content network. I have been doing this since we launched a year ago and we just got funded this week. My background is really design, programming and IT.

Allen: What is b5media?
Jeremy: We are a network of 150 blogs, we start blogs, hire writers, grow traffic and the sell lots of ads.

Allen: How can I benefit from b5media?
Jeremy: In terms of writing, we talk to anyone. We pick writers based on passion and bringing the community in. We are really good in things like providing a platform, selling ads, growing traffic, all the SEO stuff, all the foundational stuff that bloggers hate doing.

Allen: What does the rev share typically look like?
Jeremy: We are about to change it. But right now, we pay authors the first $100 is all theirs and then the rest we split 60% b5/40% author and it tends to work out to 50/50 at the end of the day. But yea the rev split is quite fair and most bloggers who put the work in making $300-500 a month.

Allen: What are the top bloggers making?
Jeremy: We have a bunch of bloggers who write several blogs. We have about half dozen bloggers earning about $2000 a month.

Allen: What does the contract look like?
Jeremy: We are all bloggers and so we don’t come at it from a corporate perspective and every blogger owns its and b5 gets a license to it. We get a bit of online exclusivity so we don’t get stung by Google for duplicate content. We get one month exclusivity but after that you can do whatever you want with it. We think that is pretty fair.

Allen: Please compare yourself to 9rules.
Jeremy: It’s fairly different – 9rules is really all about community and that’s really important to us too. The community inside is all thanks to the bloggers – and we really feel like we want to provide a lot of resources to our bloggers – hosting, web design, ad sales. And that’s just not what 9rules does – they are about the independant web and we are the anthises of what b5 does which is taking bloggers passion and turning that into a business. Certainly I understand what they are doing and respect it. B5 is all about really great authors and making money for their content.

Allen: Whats the difference between writing for b5 and getting a wordpress.com account and blogging on my own. Can’t i get Google ads same as b5 does and then I would assume I would make more money correct?
Jeremy: You might think so. When you start a blog with us you get more traffic. Most of our blogs get 1-3k pages a day in the first three months and most independent blogs don’t get that ever. You also get more Google juice and typically move to PR 6 or 7 within 3 months and we get better ad deals. With companies like Google we get an extra 10% and with Text Link Ads we get an extra 20-30%. So with us you get better and more traffic and more better paying ads. All of our research say that our bloggers get more money with us.

Allen: Who do you consider your competitors?
Jeremy: Oh sure there are more than 150 blog networks. we are the only mainstream bloggers and try to appeal to everyone. Companies like 9rules, gawker, and weblogs,inc are our biggest competitors even though we don’t really compete from a topic perspective.

Allen: Where do you see b5 media going in the next year.
Jeremy: That was a very good question. Well the obvious thing is that the verticals we are already doing is to increase the amount and quality. The second is that we want to launch more verticals including a business channel with 20-30 blogs and expanding the number of verticals is really important. Third is that we want to empower and energize our existing community of bloggers. We believe the better our bloggers do, the better we do. So we want to provide more training, more resources and more training. Obviously we have more coming but can’t talk about it right now.

Allen: Where do you see the blog going in the next year.
Jeremy: I think the next year we will see more and more growth. The next 3-5 years we will see really interesting merge between blogs and social networks around verticals and brands. Certainly the idea is that you don’t just go to MySpace, you have a community you are engaged in where you do social networking and blogging. A year really isn’t that long. Not sure exactly what I expect to see in a year. More signal, less noise.

Allen: What has been your biggest mistake since starting b5media so that people can learn from it.
Jeremy: We really didn’t plan for growth very well. We started b5 on a shared hosting provider for $5/month. And quickly grew it to 1 server, then 2, then 3. We really should have planned for growth better than we did. We had periods of 2-4 weeks where the servers were down a lot. It is important to be ready for the growth. Our biggest challenge is to give each blog a sense of identity while also keeping it easy to manage and upgrade in the future.

Allen: What else have I missed that you would like to add?
Jeremy: It is going to sound corny but we are so honored to have the team of bloggers we have. The community at b5 really makes everything happen. We love to chat about blogging. I keep my Skype on all the time, anyone can feel free to communicate with us.

Well we have reached the end of our interview with Jeremy. Thanks to Jeremy for participating and to you for reading and listening.

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