At some point this week, I’ll be rolling out a new design for Now I Know, courtesy of ad network LiveIntent.   The new version will have the same content, of course, but in a fresh new look, ads, links to the archives, and lots of dancing clowns.  (Okay, that dancing clowns thing is a joke.)

Here’s the back story and some answers to some questions I’ve gotten.

To date, Now I Know has operated on no budget whatsoever.  The expenses are real, though — it takes about 5-15 hours a week to write and maintain (sometimes more, but I don’t think ever less) and Mailchimp, the company which sends the emails out on my behalf, has a reasonable (in fact, a steal) but significant fee.  In late March, I added Amazon affiliate links to each one, in hopes of covering the Mailchimp fees (and the hosting of my website), and I’m pretty close to doing that.  

I wanted to redesign the the newsletter for its one-year anniversary, and when LiveIntent offered to do so for me, the timing was perfect.  Beyond the milestone date, I’m (again) spending a lot of time on this and am at the point where the things I want to do next I can’t do myself.  It’s small things to others, I guess, but important to me.  For example, I want to get the archives into a better format — one which I can easily edit, where the URLs look like something reputable, and can attract search engine traffic.  But that’s well beyond my skill set, and again, I have a budget of $0.  

I also realize that there is an opportunity here to grow Now I Know significantly, in a few different directions.  But each of those also requires investment on my behalf — so, I’m going to bootstrap it.  I’m not ready to talk about those opportunities yet, mostly because at this point they’re more ideas than anything else, but I’ll share as soon as reasonable.

I’ve told very few people about this to date, but here are some questions I’ve gotten — and answers:

What is this LiveIntent thing?

They’re an ad network which focuses on email newsletters.  I’m actually rather flattered that they’ve shown an interest in Now I Know, and they’ve been a pleasure to work with thus far.

What kind of ads?  Will they be intrusive?

Banner ads, like you’ve seen on basically every website in the universe.  The ads will be outside the content area — above, below, to the side, but in all cases, outside.  If you’re reading on your phone, you probably will have to zoom into the content area, but in doing so, you’ll be pushing the ads out of the viewable range.  

I don’t know who the advertisers will be, either.  LiveIntent does that all for me.  On the plus side, that means there’s no way that an advertiser can bias what I’m writing about.  On the downside, on occasion (but unlikely), there may be an ad in the newsletter which I’d rather not have appeared.  

Will there be an ad-free, paid-for version available?

The short answer: I don’t know yet.

Immediately, there won’t be.   If enough people ask for it, I’ll probably set it up.  It’s not something I was planning on doing but if there’s interest, why not?

Any other questions, just shoot me an email.