Jim Lynch: Off the Top of My Head…

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5. Offers Community Flexibility
One of the things that everybody is into these day is leveraging content to create community (and vice versa). Pluck adds the ability for readers to comment on your site through Pluck’s commenting system. There’s good and bad in this though.

The good thing is that you get an existing community built right into your site as soon as you put Pluck on your site. The bad is that people are registering with the Pluck system and not with you. So you don’t retain their information if they sign up with Pluck and you someday decide not to continue using Pluck.

However, Pluck gives you the flexibility to skip using Pluck comments on your site if you want to. So users will just see the content provided by Pluck and not comments from the Pluck network.

I haven’t decided whether I’ll keep Pluck comments on my blogs or not. For right now I’m fine with it as I’m experimenting to see what works and what doesn’t.

4. Keeps Readers On My Blog
One of the nicest things about Pluck is that it keeps my readers on my blogs. They aren’t linked out to other sites. All of their reading happens right on my sites. For smaller blogs like mine that are just at the initial growth stages this is an excellent point in favor of using Pluck On Demand.

3. Doesn’t Affect My Search Engine Rankings
Pluck works through javascript so it doesn’t adversely affect your page view rankings. Although this wasn’t a particularly big deal for me, I was glad to find out about it. We all want to be high on Google’s rankings so anything that might negatively affect that is frowned upon by bloggers and other site owners.

2. Nice People At Pluck
When I was setting up Pluck I had some email exchanges with someone there who was quite nice and helpful to me regarding some questions I had and how I could get it running on multiple domains.

Now bear in mind that nobody at Pluck On Demand knew me from a hole in the wall and certainly didn’t owe me any kind of uber-customer service. My blogs don’t do a million page views a day and certainly could not be considered to be heavyweights in any kind of traffic sense whatsoever.

But nevertheless I had a very good experience with the folks at Pluck when I asked them questions. In these days of impersonal customer service it was nice to unexpectedly run into that kind of positive experience.

1. Decent Revenue Sharing Arrangement
All other considerations aside, what do I get for running Pluck content on my sites financially? Well the Pluck revenue sharing arrangement is pretty generous for all considered, I think. Here’s what the company had to say on its Blog Burst blog:

When people click on those headlines, they are taken to a full article view within the publishers website that also include social media applications (modified from Pluck’s Sitelife solution), and advertising from our third party advertising partners. The publisher gets 50% of the net revenue from the advertising, the content contributor gets 30%, and the balance goes to Pluck.Yes – content contributors get paid for their content as it gets used. We are very excited about this.

So it’s not a bad deal at all for publishers especially small ones like myself.

Now don’t get me wrong, Pluck isn’t perfect as I noted in some of my comments above. But it strikes me as one of those ideas that – after somebody has thought of it – makes the rest of us say “geez, why didn’t somebody think of this before? It’s such an obviously good idea…”

Right now Pluck isn’t finished building their reporting module but I’ll be very interested in monitoring how well it performs on my blogs. Other things aside, it’s quite nice having extra content available to my readers.

Want to see an example of what Pluck On Demand looks like on a site? Well just scroll down and you’ll see some Pluck content right in this article page under the More On This Topic headline.

What’s your take on Pluck On Demand? Will you be signing up? Are you already using it on your site? Tell me your thoughts in the comments below.

(3 votes, average: 3.33 out of 5)

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