It made John Siracusa $15,000 in 24 hours:
His appraisal of OS X 10.7 “Lion,” published Wednesday, weighs in at 27,300 words, split across 19 webpages. And in the tech-journalism world, as in the rest of the field, how best to monetize long-form work is a matter of some question. So this year, Ars Technica decided to also sell it as a $5 Kindle ebook.
Ken Fisher, the founder and editor of Ars, is “pleasantly surprised” by the outcome. “It’s the same review that you get for free on Ars. You don’t have to pay for it,” Fisher said.
But people have: The ebook sold 3,000 copies in the first 24 hours, Fisher said. That’s a fraction of the 3 million pageviews the review has seen on the web, but Fisher thinks of it as free money. Ars has sold alternate versions of long-form content for 10 years, but Fisher said he underestimated the power of Amazon’s one-click experience, which makes impulsive purchases painless. “I was surprised by how many people told us they read the review online and they just wanted their own copy to go back to. Or they just bought it as a tip-jar kind of thing,” Fisher said.
Jay Rosen is wowed.
The Dish 