How Do We Monetize Digital History Projects?

How do we monetize digital history projects? This question preoccupies my mind. I am in a position where I need to seriously consider how I can make Ben Franklin’s World both self-supporting and a job that pays me for the time I put into the show.

In this post, you will discover how Ben Franklin's World has fared six months since its launch and six ideas for how history communicators might monetize their projects to earn the financial support they need for their work.

State of Ben Franklin’s World: 6 Months Since Launch

Ben Franklin’s World: A Podcast About Early American History launched just over 6 months ago. To date, it has 36 episodes and has received over 185,000 downloads.

Podcast Statistics

Statistically, Ben Franklin’s World has done exceptionally well.

Podcast hosting service Libsyn released statistics for January 2015. Libsyn hosts approximately 18,000 podcasts. In January 2015, new podcast episodes averaged 195 downloads within the first month of release. On average, each podcast experienced 1,921 total downloads over their entire catalog for the month.

New episodes of Ben Franklin’s World receive around 2,000 downloads within their first week of release and the entire catalog averages over 25,000 downloads per month.

Measurable Impact

Listeners engage with me to tell me how much they enjoy the show and specific episodes. Guest historians have told me that they have seen sales spikes in books after their interview aired. Recently, Mental Floss featured Ben Franklin's World in its list of “19 History Podcasts that will Delight Your Brain."

By all measures Ben Franklin’s World is a success. The podcast is realizing the goal I set out to achieve: create wide public awareness about early American history and the work of professional historians.

Financial Realities

I love producing Ben Franklin’s World and being a part of its success, but what started as a side project and hobby has become my full-time, unpaid job. In fact, I pay the podcast to keep it going.

Each episode costs $90 to produce. This cost includes website and audio hosting services, the discounted fees of my professional audio engineer, and the fees associated with the tools I need to promote each episode and help grow the audience.

This fee does not include any of my start-up costs: recording equipment and software, graphic design, website theme, educational resources, and professionally produced segment bumpers (the Ben Franklin’s World intro, outro, and in-show music and voiceovers). Nor does $90 per episode include my time.

Like many digital history projects, Ben Franklin’s World has become a very expensive hobby. As an historian without institutional support, my family funds my podcast. This needs to change.

I want to keep Ben Franklin’s World going, but I need to find a way to make the show self-funding. Ideally, I would find a way to earn enough money so that Ben Franklin’s World could start paying me for my time too.

I would also love to generate enough revenue to hire people to help with the show so I can produce more episodes, shows, and historic event podcast series (i.e. 10 episodes on the American Revolution, Civil War, Native American History, etc.) and add educational resources to each episode.

This leaves me with the quandary: How do we monetize digital history projects?

Ideas for Monetizing Digital History Projects

Presently, I have six ideas for how I and others with expensive, but worthy digital history projects might earn revenue to help support our work.

1. Advertising

Website Advertising: Google Adwords offers the easiest way to place ads on your website. However, unless you have a high-traffic website, you most likely won't earn enough income from Google Adwords to cover your website hosting costs.

The most profitable way to earn money through website advertisements is to seek out partners who want to reach your specific audience.

Podcast Episode Advertising: Many podcasters offer ads in their episodes. Some have national sponsors like MailChimp, Squarespace, Lynda.com, and Audible.com. Others have more local sponsors that are unique to their audience or they advertise their own products and services.

Podcasters present sponsor ads by reading a blurb about their sponsor or by talking about their experiences with the sponsor and their product or service. These ads might be heard at the beginning, middle, or end of the show.

Podcasters need to consider sponsor advertising carefully. When podcasters read or discuss a sponsor they provide an implicit endorsement of their sponsor.

2. Consulting

People who start digital projects often attract the interest of others who would like to start a similar project. History communicators might consider charging for the times we offer more full-length advice on how someone else can do what we do.

3. Grants

Most digital history projects should be eligible for state, federal, and private grants.

Most often this model provides only temporary support. Many public historians refer to grants as "soft money" because they offer a pre-determined amount of support for a pre-determined period of time.

With that said, I noticed at NCPH 2015 that there are many historical consultants who make a living income by pursuing “soft money” opportunities.

4. Institutional Backing

Similar to a sponsor, historians with digital history projects could seek institutional support.

There are several history organizations as well as university initiatives that have mandates or missions to support public outreach and/or digital humanities work. There is a potential that one of these organizations might be interested in bringing in a proven digital history project to help bolster their goals.

I imagine that such a partnership would require public recognition on the digital history project, consulting work to help others in the program get their projects up and running, as well as use of the proven project to help launch new, organizational digital history or humanities projects.

5. Charge Admission

Charge visitors for use of our projects.

Historians with digital history magazines, databases, podcasts, or exhibits could follow the model established by The New York Times and other digital media outlets by offering some content for free while charging for other content.

Some podcasters provide free access to their most recent episodes and charge listeners for access to their back catalogs.

I am not a fan of this option, but it does exist.

6. Crowdfunding

Sites like Kickstarter and Patreon make it possible to fund digital history projects through crowdfunding. Patreon provides a particularly attractive model.

Patreon allows content producers (bloggers, vloggers, podcast producers, writers, etc.) to ask their friends, family, and followers to become their patrons. In exchange for a monthly donation or some other reward, support for your work comes from those who consume it.

Some content producers have created four- and five-figure monthly incomes by using the service, although most content producers earn significantly less.

(See: Loug Mongello of WDW Radio and Kinda Funny Games.)

Conclusions

Digital history projects offer historians an awesome opportunity to reach out to and interact with the history-loving public.

These projects have played, and will continue to play, a large role in historians’ work to bring history back to the forefront of the public mind.

Unfortunately, all of these projects come at a cost of time and money and few academic or public history institutions have the resources to support them. This means many digital history projects will continue to be bootstrapped and exist in a precarious state until we find ways to support them.

I don’t know how I will make Ben Franklin’s World self-supporting. But, I will choose a method that ensures that all of its valuable content will continue to be available free of charge to anyone who wants to access it. This is a goal that is important to me.

What Do You Think?

Do you have ideas about how we might fund digital history projects?

Are you or your organization interested in sponsoring or forming a partnership with Ben Franklin’s World?

Let’s keep this conversation going! Leave a comment, tweet, or send me an e-mail.

History Communicators' Chat No. 1

On Wednesday May 13, 2015, historians interested in furthering the idea of "history communicators" and integrating the position into the historical profession convened on Twitter for the first of many #histcomm chats. Jackie Jecha storified the conversation.

Videos of the American Revolution Reborn 2 Conference Keynote Addresses

Get your popcorn ready! The Massachusetts Historical Society has published videos of the keynote addresses given at the "'So Sudden an Alteration': The Causes, Course, and Consequences of the American Revolution" conference.

Woody Holton offered the first keynote address on the originality crisis in American Revolution Studies.

Brendan McConville gave the second keynote address, "The Great Cycle: The Professional Study of the American Revolution, 1960-2015."

History Communicators: How We Can Return History to the Forefront of the Public Mind

How can historians solve the disconnect between the scholarship we produce and the world outside of museums and universities? How can we help non-specialists connect with the past in a way that makes it relevant to their present?

On Thursday, April 16, 2015, the National Council on Public History offered “History Communicators," a conference panel with an idea that may help the historical profession better connect with and serve the needs of society.

In this post, you will discover what “history communicators” are, where the idea came from, and thoughts about how the historical profession might integrate this new breed of historian into the profession.

The Origin of History Communicators

The idea for history communicators originated with Jason Steinhauer.

Steinhauer works as a program specialist at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. The Kluge Center strives to “bring together scholars and researchers from around the world to stimulate and energize one another, to distill wisdom from the Library’s rich resources, and to interact with policymakers and the public.”

Steinhauer’s position has allowed him to interact with scholars from many different fields. This interdisciplinary experience introduced him to “science communicators,” a position that he would like to see historians adopt.

What is a Science Communicator?

Across the disciplines of science, scientists realized that to attract funding for their work they needed to keep lawmakers, university trustees, and the public informed about how their research would better society.

Scientists recognized that the demands of lab research and university teaching prevented many researchers from discussing their investigations with those who might fund them. They also found that many researchers lacked the ability to discuss their work in a way that lawmakers, taxpayers, and university trustees could understand. The profession solved this problem by creating a new kind of scientist: A Science Communicator.

Science communicators hold Ph.D.s in science, have lab experience, and they possess the communication skills necessary to write and speak about scientific research in a way that those who might fund it can understand.

Science communicators have increased interest in and funding for scientific research by helping non-scientists grasp how scientific work and study betters their lives and improves the world. It is in large part because of the work of science communicators that the idea of STEM and its funding has taken off.

The addition of science communicators to the scientific profession has been so successful that institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created programs to train more science communicators.

Astrophysicists Neil deGrasse Tyson and Janna Levin work as science communicators.

What Could History Communicators Do for Historical Research?

Steinhauer believes that we (historians and historical organizations) should adopt and apply the science communicator model to our discpline. He advocates that we create a new type of professional historian: The History Communicator.

Steinhauer notes that historians will not be able to return history to its once prominent position in the public mind unless the profession adapts to the 21st-century job market.

Today, universities and colleges demand that history professors assume heavy teaching loads, service requirements, and work in a “publish or perish” atmosphere. These job requirements, combined with little-to-no compensation for public outreach, have created a situation where academic historians have neither the time nor motivation to interact with and help the public connect with their scholarship.

Furthermore, Steinhauer opines that academic historians should not be responsible for communicating their ideas to non-specialists: “To produce new, sharp scholarship requires tremendous time and research…Historians, then, should not also be responsible for promoting and explaining the significance of their scholarship to the public.” Instead, academic historians should be able to “focus on conducting deep research, writing, publishing, teaching and working toward tenure—all of which America needs."

If communicating the ideas of history and its relevance to the present should not fall to academic historians, whose responsibility is it?

This is where the idea of history communicators comes in.

According to Steinhauer, the “complex and political task of bringing historical research out of the scholarly communication cycle and into the mainstream requires a unique set of skills that must be cultivated, practiced, and applied across a wide range of media now available.”

Given the large time commitment that this work requires, Steinhauer would like to see the profession create and fund the role of history communicator, a “new class” of historian that will “operate on the edge and intersection of new historical scholarship and the constantly-evolving world of communicating to the public in order to keep history relevant in the 21st century.”

For Steinhauer, to be a history communicator means to be part digital humanist, content strategist, marketer, blogger, journalist, lobbyist, and historian.

History Communicators: A Discussion at NCPH 2015

Steinhauer presented his idea for history communicators at the 2015 NCPH annual meeting with Julie Golia (Brooklyn Historical Society), Nicole Hemmer (US News & World Report), and Rebecca Onion (Slate).

Steinhauer began the conversation by explaining how he came up with the idea for history communicators, the work he saw these historical professionals doing, and how public historians stood poised to pioneer the profession.

Steinhauer reiterated his view that the role of academic historians should be to produce scholarship and train students how to read primary sources, skills critical for history communicators. He also admitted that well-trained, academic historians would need to let go of their ideas of the exclusivity of the profession for history communicators to successfully perform their job.

Golia, Hemmer, and Onion served as examples of history communicators and offered insight into the types of work they do to better connect society with its past. All three work as journalists and public history professionals.

When the floor opened for comment, several public historians raised questions about where funding would come from for this type of work and where history communicators would fit into the profession. Their commentary raised the important point that funding cuts have impacted public history sites as much as, or more than, college and university departments. As a result, many public historians also do not have time to interact with the public.

To get a feel for the conversation prompted by this panel, check out “History Communicators is Launched.”

Thoughts and Ideas

I am a fan of Steinhauer’s idea: history needs history communicators.

With that said, I see three issues we need to tackle before we can create (officially) and integrate this new position into the historical profession.

First, we must solve the problem of where history communicators fit into the profession and who will pay them for their work.

It seems to me that nearly every professional historian agrees with the idea that historians need to interact with the public more. The majority of us understand that if we can restore history to the forefront of the public mind then we can fix, or at least lessen, our funding and enrollment problems. With that said, I do not see many colleges, universities, or public history organizations advertising positions for history communicators.

History communication is a job that everyone wants done, but wants someone else to pay for and do.

My passion for both producing serious historical scholarship and communicating it to the public has placed me in “professional historian limbo.” My academic and public colleagues admire and respect my work, but their university and organizational departments have no place for me or other history communicators. Therefore, many of us work without institutional or financial support.

Second, we need to find an approach that allows all historians to practice history communication. I disagree with Steinhauer's notion that academic historians shouldn’t be history communicators.

We shouldn't limit history communicators to historians of any specific historical background. The position of history communicator should be open to any professional historian who has the inclination to convey serious scholarship to the public.

Academically-trained historians are in many cases the best equipped historians to be history communicators because they know primary sources, know how they relate to the historiography, and how that historiography relates to the present. It would be best for the discipline if we could find a way to allow their active participation.

Third, we need to develop and integrate training that will enable history communicators to succeed.

We need to find space in our graduate, and possibly undergraduate, programs to add communication, technology, and marketing courses.

History communicators need to know not only history, but how to communicate, market, and place history into our technology-filled world.

We need to add training in writing, marketing, journalism, social media, blogging, podcasting, internet video production, app development, website creation, and, in the near future, virtual reality software to our student curriculums. I know this seems easier said than done.

Conclusion

Steinhauer has presented us with a great idea.

History communicators promises historians a way to return history to the forefront of public consciousness. This accomplishment would not only improve our society, but it may also alleviate our funding and enrollment problems.

Get Involved

On Wednesday, May 13 at 7pm EST, historians interested in history communication and adding history communicators to the profession will gather on Twitter to share ideas.

You can participate by following the hashtag: #histcomm.

*For more on history communicators, see Steinhauer and James Grossman’s “Historians and Public Culture: Widening the Circle of Advocacy."

Public History as a Specialty: Reflections on the 2015 NCPH Conference

Have you ever stepped outside of your professional comfort zone by attending a new conference or event? Between April 15 and 18, 2015, I tried something new: I attended my first annual meeting of the National Council on Public History. The meeting took place in Nashville, Tennessee.

In this post, you will discover what makes the NCPH annual meeting similar to and yet different from traditional academic history conferences and how the conference demonstrates public history as a specialty.

Overview of History on the Edge, NCPH 2015

The 2015 NCPH annual meeting met to “consider the edges of what we do and who we are” as public historians.

Panels explored the future of public history, how the field can collaborate with other disciplines and interact with new audiences, and how public historians can contribute to “the cutting edge questions of our societies."

(2015 NCPH Annual Meeting Program)

Exploring New-to-Me Professional Territory

I chose to attend NCPH instead of OAH because as a hybrid historian, I live with one foot in academic history and one foot in public history, and yet I had never attended a public history conference.

In 2014, I watched as my Twitter stream filled with interesting tweets about NCPH sessions and about how much fun my colleagues were having at the conference, so I made a commitment to attend my first NCPH annual meeting in 2015.

Over the course of the 3-day conference, I could not help but compare my NCPH experience with my participation in numerous AHA, OAH, SHEAR, and OIEAHC conferences. My mind made three important observations about the differences between these experiences and about the historical profession.

1. Public History is a Specialty

The NCPH defines public history as “the many and diverse ways in which history is put to work in the world.” Some know public history as “applied history” as the profession seeks to apply history to real world issues.

By those definitions, I qualify as a public historian.

I claim to be part public historian because I spend a good portion of my time trying to help non-historians form a meaningful connection with history. I perform this work by writing articles, podcasting, tweeting, and leading occasional tours of revolutionary Boston.

Although I qualify as a public historian professionally, I felt a bit out of my element at NCPH.

As I attended panels and conversed with colleagues, I came to understand that professionally-trained public historians have specialized skills that many university or research-driven historians overlook.

Public historians often work with and produce a different type of scholarship from those of us who trained as academics. They study, create, and apply theories of historical interpretation when they consider how to create exhibits and convey information to the public.

Sessions on project management and how to include and interpret women at historic sites offered a glimpse of how public historians create exhibits and interpretive programs. This process involves more than just determining what historical facts to include or omit. It involves a careful consideration of audience, perspective, organization mission statements, funding, exhibit space, and the consideration and application of theories for how to convey information to visitors through print, visuals, and tech devices.

Anyone who thinks that public history makes a great “Plan B” for graduate students who train as academic historians should attend NCPH. Once they take part in a few sessions and interact with their public history colleagues they will realize that public historians work on history, but in a different way from academics.

Public historians grapple with a different set of scholarly issues that most academic programs don’t expose their graduate students to. If academic programs want to make public history a viable “Plan B” for their graduates, then they need to collaborate with public history programs to offer training in the skillsets required by the public history profession.

2. Historians Need to Collaborate More

Public historians face many of the same or similar problems that academic historians face: Lack of funding, inadequate institutional resources or support, and insufficient compensation for interacting with the public.

Additionally, both academic and public historians grapple with interpretive questions that each specialty could help the other answer.

In a session about how to include and interpret women in historical sites and museum exhibits, someone raised the question about how public historians can overcome the lack of women’s voices in the historical record. Academic historians receive training in how to look at and use what the historical record does not say.

Conversely, some of the techniques that public historians use to interpret history could be of real value to academic historians.

As I mentioned in “Wanted: 21st-Century History Job,” the future of the field lies in collaboration and in the development of more hybrid historians. Together academic and public historians can cultivate wide public awareness about the past and convey history in a way that makes it as relevant to the present.

3. NCPH is a Fun and Great Conference for Networking

I won’t lie, I was nervous about attending NCPH.

Part of what I love about attending conferences is catching up with friends. I knew I would know a few attendees from Twitter, but the majority of my professional network and historian friends do not attend NCPH.

My fears of being unwelcome or lonely disappeared within the first 15 minutes of the conference. The first person I met introduced herself and we became fast friends.

Most NCPH attendees were very welcoming. They wanted to be at NCPH and they wanted to interact with and meet new people.

In fact, the public historians I met seemed more concerned with meeting me as a person rather than me as an historian. We met each other as people before we delved into professional chit-chat about where we worked and what areas of history interested us. This type of interaction happened throughout the conference.

Additionally, NCPH encourages attendees to visit the host city. They build walking and museum tours into the conference program; participating in a tour counts as attending a conference session.

I am famous for attending history conferences and never visiting the sites around me because I am so focused on the conference program. I would have done the same at NCPH, but the program encouraged me to have fun and consider history and history conversations outside of the conference hotel. Tours also allowed me to meet and meaningfully network with more people during these shared experiences.

Conclusion

NCPH is a fun conference and one that every historian should make a point to attend.

NCPH will introduce you to a welcoming group of historians and their professional work.

I plan to attend NCPH every two or three years. This periodic attendance will help me stay abreast of what my public historian colleagues are up to, what challenges they face, and where opportunities exist for collaboration between academically-trained and public historians.

Share Your Story

Have you ever attended NCPH? What was your experience like?

What is the most fun history conference you attend?