Many of you have seen the news that Teens in Tech has acquired the Youth Bloggers Network (YBN) run by 15 year old, Patrick DeVivo (@patrickdevivo), I just wanted to take a moment and explain why we decided to take this route.
Teens in Tech is all about empowering teenage media content within a community. Patrick originally emailed Teens in Tech in February wanting to learn more, etc. We started talking about how Youth Bloggers Network and Teens in Tech could integrate to bring our communities together. From that, we had the idea of merging and being one big network. Patrick and I went back and forth to try to figure out how this will work, and we finally decided on bring YBN in as part of the Teens in Tech Community. After a few weeks of negotiations and calls with lawyers and advisors, we started working on plans for how we will approach this and how we will make it happen.
YBN will remain it’s own site and forum, but under the Teens in Tech name and brand as a property. We are combining Teens in Tech with YBN as one big community because we are staying true to our message: empower teenage media content. We haven’t really focused too much on the community aspect, and we hope that with the addition of YBN and Patrick on our team, Teens in Tech will rise.
One issue that has come up is revenue. Many have asked, how will Teens in Tech ever make money. We currently have two ideas. The first is what we call Publisher Advertising. Basically, we will split advertising with our publishers so Teens in Tech makes revenue, as well as our publishers (it’s a win-win situation). We are working with partners right now to establish this system. The second route is pro services. Pro services seems to be the easy way out these days, and we’ve thought hard on how to differentiate. We’ve decided that we are going to offer pro features like custom domain names (EXAMPLE.teensintech.com), more storage space (we added 250 MB last night for each user adding to 750 MB for each user), and more. YBN will also be making revenue through advertising, and we hope to extend Publisher Advertising to both networks after our pilot program. Changes to this will be occurring as we focus more on the this subject, but as of right now, these are the plans.
As Teens in Tech works more and more on new features and ideas, I always would love to know what you think. Feel free to get in touch with me directly at dbrusilovsky@teensintech.com or Twitter me at @danielbru.
I hope you understand our choice, and continue to support Teens in Tech.
Thanks,
Daniel Brusilovsky
Founder/CEO, Teens in Tech
P.S Teens in Tech is open to new registrations this weekend! If you don’t have an account, register now!

Welcome Hany Rashwan!
I’m very happy to welcome Hany Rashwan (@iHany) to the Teens in Tech team! Hany is a 18 year old student in Columbus, Ohio joining Teens in Tech as a Senior Web Developer.
I first met Hany at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco, and we immediately hit it off. Hany will be working on Teens in Tech as well as our sister site and brand new property, YBN.
Please welcome, Hany!