Marketing Ninja

In this interview I ask HubPages’ CEO Paul Edmondson about the future of HubPages, about his experience with Microsoft, and what HubPages is “looking for” as far as monetizeable content is concerned. If you missed my initial Startup Spotlight on HubPages then you should give it a read.

1. How quickly is HubPages growing? What are your expectations for its future growth?

HubPages is growing very quickly, faster that our best expectations. We launched in August 2006, and we currently have over 100,000 registered users, and the site enjoys over 5 million visitors every month. More importantly, we’ve seen the number of really high-quality writers multiply rapidly. We’d be very happy if the trend we’ve seen so far continues along its current trajectory!

2. What did you learn from your experience at Microsoft? How has that experience been relevant to HubPages?

The skills you learn at Microsoft are very different from those you learn at a start-up. All three of us (Jay Reitz, Paul Deeds and I) worked at Mongo Music, a start-up that was acquired by Microsoft, and that provided an experience more similar to that which we’re having now. I will say, though, that at Microsoft, you learn how to build great products. And building great products, whether you’re one of the largest companies on the planet or a small start-up, is one of the fundamental keys to success.

3. One of the core aspects of your business model is sharing revenue with your contributors. What sort of Hubs are you looking for? Which ones are the most profitable for HubPages and its users?

The best Hubs are those that are perennially useful, or “evergreen” – they should be as useful, interesting and informative years from now as they are today. Hubs that provide uniquely detailed, in-depth information on a topic tend to draw in the healthiest traffic, and excellent traffic typically translates into healthy revenue for our authors (and us). That said, Hubs on certain topics, such as finance/money and business, will generate significantly more money on a per-visitor basis than other topics, such as entertainment and celebrities.

4. What’s been the greatest challenge, technical or otherwise, in the course of establishing and running HubPages?

The greatest challenge we’ve had has been in cultivating a thriving writers’ community, something that we’re proud to say we’ve done with great success. Not only do our users write great stuff, they read and comment on each other’s Hubs, provide essential feedback and help each other out. We have had to cope with spammers who come to exploit HubPages’s trust with search engines, but thankfully we’ve set up systems to clear that kind of content out, and our community has been critically important in flagging the type of content that does not meet our standards.

5. What was your inspiration for HubPages? What are your long-term goals for HubPages?

Our inspiration for HubPages was the realization that there was so much valuable content being created by people online, in specialized discussion forums, on blogs, in the comments of news sites, that was of exceptionally high quality…but that it wasn’t earning those people any money. HubPages would enable people to quickly and easily—without any knowledge of HTML—to assemble an attractive, useful web article, and allow them to share in that article’s intrinsic value. It’s a model that has really taken off with our enthusiastic user base. We have lots of users that are earning hundreds of dollars per month, and a few over a thousand—on what they’ve already written. As we’re all witnessing with the writers’ strike in Hollywood, there is a lot of long-term, residual value in creating high-quality content.

Long-term, our goal (and expectation) is for HubPages to be the main site on the Web for writers of all kinds to make money from their own content. To that end, we will continue to integrate new features and enhancements to the platform, while retaining its simplicity and ease of use.

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