Those of you not familiar with MCM have no doubt been living under a rock in the world of digital publishing. MCM is the mad scientist of the weblit community, always cooking up some totally insane idea of how to do things differently and pulling together equally insanely pretty websites to do it.
Recently he started his newest experiment: 3D1D or Three Days One Draft. You can read all about it here and here, but suffice to say … you remember that Walk for The Cure thing you sponsored your Aunt for once? This is kind of like that … only with writing.
Prime ad space (and I do mean prime) was sold for 51 chapters. $1 for chapter 1, $2 for chapter 2 … and so on for a grand total of $1,326 for those of you playing along at home. Wow, that’s some chunk of change for three days work. Certainly more than most writers make on their self published masterpieces. WAY more than any of us could ever hope to make on an unedited first draft, but of course that all hinges on MCM’s ability to sell out the advertising space. As of this post he’s only sold $386 of it … still nothing to sneeze at I think, but short of the goal.
Because absolutely no one wants to hear my assesment of this from a creative standpoint (including myself), let’s look at it from a business one instead. Success is contingent on two factors: 1) traffic, MCM has built in clever twitter games and a point system that helps cultivate that but the story needs a presence like a flashmob to sell ads once the cheap-o ones are all gone. 2) conversion, it’s easier to find a handful of advertisers willing to buy several pages than it is to find 51 willing to buy one, but in order to do that you have to give them some hope that people will click those ads.
Okay, so the 3d1d project is the most ridiculously unsustainable of all completely unsustainable writing revenue models (at least the way MCM is doing it… 3 days of marathon writing … almost no sleep), but in fairness to MCM I don’t think it was ever intended to be a revolution in the future of publishing. I think it was intended to be just good fun, and of course the ever present cynic in me adds: probably a publicity stunt.
And I add to that, that I really really hope it works, because MCM has been very good to the weblit community and anything good for him is also good for us 
So naturally I was pumped to scoop up some advertising (or actually if you believe what you hear on twitter >.> …. LOTS of advertising), but was our participation in the 3d1d experiment a good investment for fluffy-seme?
Because I’m obsessed with ad making, I whipped up three different ads for our baby series Split-Self. These are they (resized to fit this layout)
I wanted three completely different looks so that we could grab attention three completely different ways. Note that the first two directed to Split-Self’s main page, while the second directed to the first chapter.
Let’s look at the stats:
It’s hard to really know what to make of the click through ratio without knowing MCM daily pageviews … but otherwise these are not the greatest numbers. No surprise, visitor’s following the 3d1d story, want to actually READ the 3d1d story … not be redirected to someone else’s story. Good news for MCM as an engaging writer, bad news for him as a guy selling advertising space. Ironies of ironies, more and more success in web advertising is coming down to building sites that people want to navigate away from. If that seems counterintuitive, it is. It’s also why websites have gone from making solid revenue’s in ad space to barely scraping by … the advent of more sophisticated analytics mean that advertisers don’t just want high traffic sites anymore, they want high traffic site with click throughs.
…..So as time goes on, it’s quite possible that Google Analytics will put Google Adsense out of business.
Other thing we notice is that boys with anorexia apparently don’t sell. Fashion industry take note.
Now, this is just preliminary because 3D1D is still going on, and even once it’s done I imagine MCM will leave the story posted with the ads as is. So I’ll update this report later with additional data as needed, but until then … well I dunno, other than the fact that the story itself is actually fantastic I don’t know how successful I’d deem 3D1D from a business stand point.
But knowing MCM this will do nothing to deter the next crazy writing/revenue experiment. And for that, our hats go off to him … because someone has to do this work and we like to sleep too much
Admin, President and all around person in-charge of fluffy-seme. Doesn't like writing bios, but likes writing pretty much everything else. Can be reached at seme@fluffy-seme.net 
