Helium Archive

Helium CEO Mark Ranalli was on the Fox Business show during the 6am hour. I grabbed the clip and embedded it below (no comments on the audio or lamp!). We covered the Helium marketplace last year including a chat with Ranalli. Helium provides a marketplace where writers can post their content, the community decides on the best stories in a topic and then newspapers and other media outlets can buy the content. The content author and Helium share in the generated revenue.

Ranalli noted on Fox that last year their top earner last year made $5,000 and they have thousands of writers earning hundreds of dollars a month. A lot of the stories will earn nothing or next to nothing so to some extent you are placing a lot of content out there in the hopes that some of it gets paid to make up for the stories that don’t get paid.

Ranalli also spoke about deals Helium is working with some of the largest newspaper companies in the U.S. and apparently there are some upcoming deals as well. His goal is to have Helium writers create the lifestyle content (book reviews, movie reviews, etc.) for the newspapers. That will allow the paper to support the writers desk. He did note that they are not trying to solve journalism and that investigative stories should be left to the professionals.

Helium from allen stern on Vimeo.

Yesterday I spoke with Mark Ranalli, Helium CEO about their content marketplace. Helium launched in October 2006 and has over 100,000 active writers with over 600,000 stories accepted into the system.

The idea is pretty interesting: Publishers post requests for content and then writers post their stories for review. The publisher then selects one, based on their review plus user-contributed reviews. The other articles that are "left-over" remain on the Helium site and form a topic area in which articles are rated and the best content moves to the top. Writers earn a rev share on the ads that are supplied by Helium on the left-over content.

For the story that gets selected, the publisher pays the writer the agreed upon price. Checking out the available stories, the prices range from $15-$75 and Ranalli notes that they have stories with prices upwards of $200/story. Helium charges a 20% fee to the publisher and the publisher also pays a listing fee.

Their latest announcement is a partnership with the National Press Club (NPC). Since stories are rated, the NPC will select some of the best stories from citizen journalists into the NPC.

I like this concept because if your story isn’t selected, it still has a venue to be seen. The revenue from the left-over content side won’t be enough to retire on, but I am guessing the visibility for the writer is more important towards future article acceptance.

Over the past week I have been speaking with Gonzalo Arzuaga. Gonzalo runs a new site located at KillerStartups where he reviews lots of new startups. I asked Gonzalo if he would be willing to pick five startups every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to profile on CenterNetworks. He agreed and below is the first post – let's call it a beta! Let me know if you like this idea!

Scrapblog.com – Create a World for your Pictures

Scrapblog is an awesome site that goes above and beyond all of your scrapbooking dreams. The different backgrounds, stickers, and templates available are endless. You can even add videos, links, music, and audio narration to give your scrapblog some flavor. More info »

Helium.com – Democratization of Knowledge at its Finest

Helium operates in a manner similar to Wikipedia, but it differs in its organization, content, and style of writing. The premise is that any given topic should have at least a couple of different articles written about it. Then, users read them and rate them, and the highest-rated articles make it to the top. More info »

Swoot.com – A New Face for the Internet

Swoot, you could say, is a browser portal; download one plug-in and you'll be able to access any browser on a range of subjects. Swoot is like window dressing for your virtual view; don't get tied down to the standards, tailor your browser, make it your own. More info »

Virb.com – A Social Networking Revolution

Forget the clutter and applications that never work of MySpace and check out the new social network, Virb, that will blow all others away. It's like they saw how much people hated the chaos of other social networks and decided to bring us the clarity and crispness we desired with a whole bunch of other fun features that work really well. More info »

GoPlan.info – Online Project Management and Collaboration Tool

Goplan provides you with all of the tools you need to productively and efficiently perform group projects. Their features include: managing multiple projects, managing task lists, controlling issues with issue tracking, publishing public facing project news, synchronizing everyone with a calendar, chatting in real-time with project members, and more. More info »