GeekMBA360

Amazon.com recently launched Kindle Publishing For Blogs Beta Program.

The business model is simple: if you have a blog with RSS feed, you can sign up for the program and make it available to Kindle readers. Amazon will charge a monthly subscription fees to Kindle readers for each blog. Amazon splits the revenue 70/30 with bloggers. Amazon determines the subscription price for each blog based on market demand. Currently, most blogs have monthly subscription rate of $1.99.

Is this a good deal for bloggers? Should you sign up for this program?

Let’s break this down into two use cases: you have an existing blogs, or you will start a new blog exclusively for Kindle.

Use case #1: you have an existing blog

Amazon Kindle currently has 1 million users. Although Kindle has very impressive growth rate, 1 million users is still a very small number comparing to blogsphere. Furthermore, I think most Kindle users will not pay for $1.99/month just to read a blog while the free version of the blog is readily available.

From a monetization standpoint, bloggers with existing blogs make little money.

However, there is one big advantage: this could be a great marketing tool for your blog. Through this program, you’ll make your blog visible to 1 million Kindle users. If they like your blog, they probably will visit your blog via their computers.

In summary, my recommendation is that you should still sign up for this program and use it as a marketing tool to attract more users to your blog, but don’t bet on it as a monetization tool.

Use case #2: start a blog exclusively for Kindle

The key assumption for this use case is that you can create such compelling blog content that you’ll attract a significant number of Kindle users to subscribe to your blog (since your blog is exclusive for Kindle and is not freely available.)

I think this might work, but you better have something really unique and compelling to say. And your blog is in a niche market that have large enough audience within the Kindle user community.

Let’s say that you can attract 5% of the overall Kindle user base, which is 50,000. The total monthly revenue from your blog would be $100,000. Amazon will get $70,000 while you get $30,000. You get paid at a rate of $0.6/user.

Is this a good revenue for your blog? Well, how much revenue do you think a regular blog with similar number of unique users (not on Kindle) will make? Johnchow.com had about 200,000+ unique users and it made about $40,000 a month (based on the most recent income numbers John Chow reported on his blog, which was several months ago.) And he monetized a hack out of his blog. He gets about $0.2/unique user. In fact, I think the actual rev/user number is lower since Johnchow.com also have a lot of RSS subscribers in addition to the 200,000+ unique users.

So, I would say that if you can convince enough Kindle users to subscribe to your Kindle-only blog, you could make good money.

Summary:

1. If you have an existing blog, sign up for this program and use it as a promotion tool
2. If you think you can create a Kindle-only blog that attract thousands of Kindle users to pay $1.99 a month to subscribe, you should give it shot. You might end up making good money, more than the income you’d have earned from ad/affiliate support revenue stream.