Helium Offers Lift for Freelancers and Publishers
Important Details: Freelancing’s business practices go back to the days of Charles Dickens. Writers toil away in merry obscurity. They finish pieces and then cast them off to would-be publishers, hoping for a bite. Sure, they can e-mail them these days, when than posting them, but the process hasn’t change much. Helium, an Andover, Mass-based start-up may be changing that.
Tour Helium and you see the application of several Web 2.0 principles to the old trade. In short, Helium has created an exchange for writers and publishers to meet, to find common ground and to….get published. To grease the skids, Helium has put together an ambitious rating and ranking system, enabling the Helium community to rank both its contributing writers (more than 100,000 have signed up and written 625,000 articles) and their output. CEO Mark Ranalli tells Outsell that Helium has put in anti-gaming-the-system protections. Those protections basically offer raters stories to consider, but don’t allow them to pick which stories they are going to rate. The result: individual writers are star-ranked (one through five), with a tough grading scale, only “a couple of dozen” have five-star and 4.5% one star or more. Then individual articles are rated, by topic (for instance, Kissimmee, Florida: Discover more than Disney World) or (Should the US Continue the Cuban Boycott?), each topic having received more than a dozen article submissions. Quality is of course all over the board, but there’s a good amount of credible content, especially in feature areas, on the site.
The idea is to make it easier for publishers to solicit articles on topics and then pick the best for publication. In the Marketplace product, due to come out of beta within a week or so, publishers of any size — from newsletter to magazine publishers — can solicit articles and set pricing. Helium does the matching, offers a standard contract and takes a 20% commission. So far, Marketplace has attracted a dozen smaller publishers, offering less than $100 per piece.
Helium’s emerging business model is three-fold:
- It’s a publisher/freelancer exchange, attempting to reduce the friction in that process.
- It’s an About.com-like site, offering lots of article within the usual vertical categories, available for reading on the open web and monetized by advertising, which in turn has supplied some meager income to writers. “A handful have made thousands of dollars, hundreds are making hundreds and and tens of thousands less than a hundred,” says Ranalli, who adds the site has three million unique visitors each month.
- The Helium infrastructure can be used, in a co-branded or private-branded way, by publishers or organizations to streamline their own management of user-generated content. Ranalli cites use by animal-rights organization PETA and by Boston-area, news free-daily publisher Boston Now (a start-up competitor to Metro) as first examples of such use.
Implications: Outsell believes Helium is a fascinating example of how routinely Web 2.0 tools (ranking, rating, sharing, exchange) are being applied to new fields. For all kinds of publishers, those tools are getting to be entry-level and any publisher who still thinks in the old we publish/you read mode is going to be left in the dust.
In its fledgling business — facilitating freelance buying and selling — Helium may face a tough slog. Like Mochila, on the content syndication side of the business, it is a smartly built system that understands the concerns and habits of those in the marketplace. The functionality is good and fits in the real world. Like Mochila, it has built out supply first — necessarily — and now needs to see the demand side understand the marketplace’s value and adopt it in a reasonable time period.
Outsell believes that the implication for news publishers may even be more interesting, though, than that of freelance facilitation. That opportunity may be in what Ranali calls a “community engagement engine.” News publishers want to jump into the user-generated, citizen-contributed world — witness Pluck, YourHub, Topix, The Port — experimentation. One issue in that world is separating the wheat from the chaff. The Helium thinking (and maybe product) may provide an answer: create a community of contributors and let them (appropriately) rank each other. Then pick the best and publish online or in print in community tabs.