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BREAKING NEWS & VIEWS
Marta Wohrle's TruthInAging.com Uncovers E-Commerce Buy ButtonWednesday, January 13, 2010 When I launched Truth In Aging the idea was to meet what I felt was a growing need for objective, well-researched consumer reporting. My website covers beauty products and, in particular, antiaging cosmetics. These products are complex (these days, you need a degree in chemistry to understand the ingredients list of the average face cream), there is a high level of emotional engagement with them (people really want them to work, to make them look better) and most of the information available is poor (amounting to little more than rewritten press releases). My starting point was to create a better kind of beauty journalism, but very quickly it became clear to me that Truth In Aging’s readers were “in market.” They were researching products in order to buy them. Yet, initially, I wasn’t even providing prices. Reader feedback encouraged me to provide shopping information, links to buy products and, eventually, we became an Amazon affiliate. By the summer of 2009, it had become clear to me that what started as a niche content site supported by advertising was morphing into a recommendation engine. Readers were jumping off our website and buying the products that we recommended in the hundreds. Literally. The problem was that as an Amazon affiliate, Truth In Aging’s commission on each product was about 7-8.5%. I was going to need a huge scale to make a living from Amazon. Nonetheless, ecommerce was clearly the way to go. Truth In Aging needed to be a smart shop. But how? The logistics of creating a commerce platform were beyond a small content site. Just as I was grappling with this, I came across a venture-backed start-up called OpenSky. The founder of OpenSky is John Caplan, the former president of About.com and CEO of the Ford Model Agency. His vision was to create a platform from which passionate experts could sell the products that they were recommending and share in the upside in a meaningful way. What’s more, our values – to be impartial, truthful, and objective – were aligned. Even Truth In Aging’s contract with OpenSky obliges us to uphold those values. We can only sell products we genuinely love and we can’t accept payment from suppliers to write about their products. Although Truth In Aging still serves display ads and refers shoppers to Amazon, we now have our own store that sells uncommon products that we believe in. We aim to give value to all our readers by making them as well informed as we can, and we reward our most loyal readers, who subscribe to our newsletters, with discounts and exclusive promotions on products. What excites me is that monetizing a relatively small but very loyal readership is now feasible. Most publishers are grappling with how to make money from their online sites in the face of commoditized and volatile advertising CPMs. This has led to a misguided – in my view – industrywide debate about introducing paid content. For all but a handful of valuable b2b sites and truly unique consumer sites, online subscriptions are not feasible. However, this could be the right time to rethink content’s relationship with commerce. Online shopping is mostly an impersonal experience, driven almost entirely by price and convenience. Content experts can bring personality to online shopping and forge trust in a way that can be powerful. As OpenSky’s John Caplan says, it is about interactions, not transactions. Marta Wohrle is president of Accord Media, the publisher of Truth In Aging, among other digital content titles. Previously she was SVP, digital media, Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S., and director of Mercer Management Consulting. If you have breaking news to share please contact Steve Smith at ssmith@accessintel.com
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