Articles by Glenn Stok
In April 2018, I was invited to attend Maven’s Conference along with 25 HubPages authors to discuss the business plan for the merger of the two companies. It gave me the opportunity to meet some of the key players and ask questions.
Since then, Maven has been taken over by The Arena Group, a publicly traded content platform that now hosts our articles.
This is a review of what I learned at that three-day conference held in Whistler, British Columbia, Canada. HubPages has always worked hard at doing whatever was necessary to help authors succeed. They understood the importance of professionally written content that had proven credibility.
Maven was aware of that, which is why they were interested in acquiring HubPages.
James Heckman, Maven's CEO, said in his keynote address “Our goal is to create a revolution. That business plan is necessary in the wake of large media firms that are too powerful.”
He went on to explain, “This makes us bigger than the New York Times, bigger than Yahoo News, bigger than CNN, and heading towards Twitter size.”
He explained that the plan to combine the best authors and journalists, who have survived the latest struggles of the Internet and have a passion for writing intense and superb content, creates the most powerful union that demands a premium opportunity for advertisers.
Combining three companies (Maven, HubPages and Say Media) was a self-fulfilling prophecy with a combined 98 million monthly visitors from organic traffic.
The two platforms were quite unique in the way they handled content publishing. Maven was more related to building a coalition of journalists while HubPages is a community of writers for magazine-type articles.
Changes were expected on both ends, but the tools and publishing methods HubPages had developed would remain. For example, individual network niche sites remained under the domains as they had been created.
The work that HubPages has done was already proven to help improve our ranking with search engines. I spoke with Paul Edmondson (Co-Founder and CEO of HubPages) on a number of occasions over these days together, and he agreed that HP understands that. There was no reason to unravel that progress, but rather, to build upon it.
In any case, our method of income for writing articles on HubPages also would not change. For that matter, it will only get better with new income streams being created—such as Header Bidding and Exchange Bidding Dynamic Allocation (EBDA), not to mention new advertising technology from Say Media.
Maven expanded their efforts for our success with the acquisition of Say Media, a technology and advertising firm.
I personally had the opportunity to chat with an employee of Say Media on the shuttle back to the airport and we discussed their use of Header Bidding. This is a method of selling ad space on our articles to the highest bidder, thereby leading to increased revenue.
On the last day of the conference Josh Jacobs, one of the Maven founders and a media and technology innovator, gave a speech that made everything clear.
Josh explained that writers continue to own their content and are free to use it as they see fit. Writers can concentrate on content creation and not worry about how to make everything work.
Technology is changing rapidly and Maven engineers work on methods to engage readers, keep them on the site longer, and keep them coming back often.
It was wonderful to have had the opportunity to finally meet other HubPages authors and get to know them personally. We’ve shared socially over these few days at the conference.
It wasn’t only all conference meetings. We ate together in restaurants took excursions away from the hotel, and one day we traveled into the mountains where the skiers were enjoying the snow.
I felt privileged to ride the Peak2Peak gondola on Whistler Mountain with Paul Edmondson, the founder of HubPages. We had a chance to talk and share ideas.
Paul mentioned that he felt a responsibility for his writers and helping them keep their income. I realize that has always been the focus. After all, they get 40% of the revenue we generate from our articles.
The experience of getting to know other writers was most delightful. I learned that no matter what their beliefs, attitudes, or backgrounds, they are all genuine people with kind manners and respected insight. One can see why they are successful with their writing.
Writers on HubPages will continue to have the tools to publish articles on the network niche sites that are monetized by Google AdSense and the HubPages’ Ad Program, as well as Amazon sales.
All in all, I came home with a new appreciation for this entire business plan. I expect us all to be around for a long time while the Internet, and media in general, change over the years.