We have our date for the next edition of The Sway!

Save Tuesday, July 7, 2009 for a bigger and better event with new speakers, new guests to network with and lots mores to be announced.

If you’d like to come along, you can RSVP if you’re already a member by clicking through to http://www.meetup.com/TheSway/ and if you’re not, you can click the ‘apply to attend’ button on the right hand side of the screen.

See you there!

The Sway in May will be held on May 26th, and will kick off at 7.30pm – but we’ll be there and ready to go from 7, providing you with a little time for drinks and mingling.

It will take place at Great Eastern Dining Rooms, on the corner of Great Eastern Street and Charlotte Road (google maps link).

The Sway is a movement. It is a gentle grass-roots movement, led not by advertisers and ad networks, but by content creators. It is driven by the fact that it is increasingly difficult to make money from publishing content. Unless you have a huge audience and dedicated ad sales team, it can be hard to make a living from content, and with CPM rates sliding down lower and lower, something has got to give.

We here at Skimlinks have a solution to help publishers, but we are not the only option, and our efforts alone aren’t enough to create the required change in the industry. We have been advocating for some time to advertisers and merchants the importance of rewarding content creators for factors other than traffic size, but this movement needs the groundswell force of bloggers and publishers to educate the market and pave the way for new business models.

We believe that part of the solution will be finding a balance between commercialism and editorial, but finding that balance needs debate, self-discipline, and codes of conduct. That is part of what The Sway will be about: how to be commercial without being manipulative to your users.

Our vision for The Sway is it will be part networking for commercial content creators, part learning of what is working for other content creators, and part debate to build up our own industry ethics for how to make money from content in an ethical way. And there will be wine.

Come join us, spread the word. Places are limited and invitation-only, but ask us for an invitation if you’d like to come!

The Sway in May is open to a limited number of guests – so if you’ve received an invitation through Meet Up, make sure you RSVP ASAP to ensure you get to come along to the first event in this series.