Slashdot Mirror
Wanted - An Online Publishing Business Model?
Eric Smalley asks: "Wanted: an online publishing business model that falls somewhere between lone weblogger and corporate media behemoth. Technology Research News (TRN) has been publishing original news stories for over five years, but we have yet to find a way to cover our costs. We are fairly popular and well-woven into the fabric of the Web; we have over 200,000 unique visitors per month, we are well represented in Google, Yahoo and MSN search results, and we are regularly slashdotted and pointed to by Wired News, other media sites and countless weblogs. Our overriding goal has been to keep the news free, including our archive. Is there no place for a small, independent media company founded and run by journalists?"
"We make money by selling subscriptions to a PDF edition, selling white-paper-like reports through our site and resellers, supplying other media sites with our content through a newswire, selling subscriptions to an off-line electronic edition through a reseller, collecting fees from Lexus Nexis and other online databases, and carrying Google's Adsense advertisements. Most recently we have begun a PBS-like fund drive. That's a lot of revenue streams, but they don't add up to enough. Our costs are modest: two full-time editors, one contributing editor and two part-time staffers."
You have a page rank of 8/10. Thats insane. You have one tiny Google Ads box. While ads can be annoying, just choose non-annoying ads. With such a high page rank you should be exploiting that.
Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
Is this a joke? Seriously- with 200K unique users a month, if you can't keep your head above water, you have a business problem. Not all ads are annoying. You don't need pop ups and Java ads. Throw some text links on there.
If you want to be a zillionaire, that may not work for you. But lots of sites have ads and people aren't annoyed. Those who expect ad free, cost free content are out there, but anyone with a brain understands someone has to pay the bills. And PBS fund drives? Keep in mind PBS also gets taxpayer support, and they have unobtrusive ads (This show brought to you by Archer Daniels Midland, Supermarket to the world...)
We make money by selling subscriptions to a PDF edition I would never pay for any pdfs, I hate them, but thats just me.
And All I Ask is a Tall Ship And a Star to Steer Her By
A website of mine was linked to on the front page of Slashdot last year and I had Google Adsense on it. After 30,000 pageviews that day I made a little over $1 ;)
"You may need to scroll right to see all the ads"? Are you serious? Nobody's gonna do that.
Do one of two things- 1) follow the advice of the people posting here. 2) Hire one of the people posting here as an ad consultant, if it makes you feel better (give them a percentage of the increase in revenue), then follow their advice.
Seriously, your present scheme is about as wrong as it can get.
First, yes there is "a small, independent media company founded and run by journalists." The key though is that you need to run it like a businessman, not as a journalist.
I know hundreds of people who want to be freelance writers or journalists. Some of them quite well. But, for every one I know who makes a living at it, I know two dozen who don't.
The secret? Treat it like a business first.
What's your business plan? You describe several tried, true and _lame_ ways of making money from journalism. Online advertising and newsletter subscriptions are the only ones that have a proven track record of working.
How many online publications do you see making living money from the methods you describe? I can't think of any.
Google ads by themselves though, won't cut it. You need someone who spends all their time looking for advertisers.
If you go the newsletter route, you typically have to become the Expert in one area that people with money want insider information on.
Now, that can be pretty broad. Fred Langa does very well with his personal computing newsletter, the Langa List (http://www.langa.com/), but Fred, former editor of chief in Byte in the good old days of print tech. journalism, already had a lot of fans.
OK, so those models can work, but you also have to content people value and want to read.
200K unique readers a month is good, but it's not good enough.
Still, with 200K, and aggressive, non-intrustive advertising, you should be able to generate enough cash to survive on.
But, income is only part of the equation. In a real business, yoy must learn how to manage your money. This isn't a skill that for some reason many writers or journalist have, but learning how to keep costs as low as possible while maximizing revenue is a must.
That sounds simple. It's not. It's a skill your group must master though.
I've made more money in journalism years ago than I am now, but I'm doing much better overall. My secret? I finally learned finance 101.
Finally, you really aren't staffed up enough to "deeper understanding of the wide swath of research discoveries poised to affect the technologies driving day-to-day life and business."
Pick a narrow area of technology, stick with it, and you can probably provide the "deeper understanding," you're striving to cover. Once people learn that your site is The site for nano-engineering, which seems a reasonable goal based on your existing coverage, you can probably make a go of it.
Good luck.
Steven,
Senior Editor, Ziff Davis Internet (http://www.eweek.com/
Editor, Practical Technology (http://www.practical-tech.com/
Chairman, Internet Press Guild (http://www.netpress.org/
I don't agree.
Here's some pointers:
1. You need more traffic. Right now you don't get enough views. Maybe run some PPC ads on google and yahoo to get your readership up. You may also want to either narrow or broaden your focus, to make your site more appealing to a particular range of readers.
2. Put big adsense ads in the middle of the articles. Yes, its annoying, but your CTRs will go up dramatically. Its not about so many adsense ads, its the CTR which counts.
3. Build a list. Use email to let readers know when you have something big going on. Get them back to your site more regularly. Sure, RSS is great, but use email as well to be sure. People can unsubscribe if they don't like it.
4. Offer some high end offers. eg consulting or coaching. When you have readers, they're interested in what you're writing about. Maybe you can take on custom research projects or offer training in particular areas you have expertise in. You could be doing contracts worth $100k+ every few months just from your current site traffic. Ask your readers what they want.
5. Look at how other online journalism sites are doing it. Techdirt has some custom stuff they do for big companies. Others have other approaches. Look at everyone and pick the right one for you.
5.
About five minutes ago.
:D
Look for the "discuss" link/icon underneath any Yahoo! news story.
1. Make the look and layout of your site more appealing... pretty, even.
2. Narrow your scope and specialise in one interesting niche sector, then branch out slowly.
3. Place ads where people will see them and check that your content generates useful adsense ads. Double-check the ads, they are critical!
4. Cut your business costs, every day.
5. Find a more memorable name. I already forgot it. Also, a slogan, a logo, a mascot, a symbol. Anything to stand out a little.
6. Increase your traffic considerably: 200k unique visitors is not enough to live on.
7. Find sponsors systematically: for band width, for hosting, for special issues, whatever.
8. People will not pay to read tech news unless it is really, really, special. Make it so. Then charge for it.
9. Allow people to discuss articles and issues. Get your audience involved and clicking.
10. Find excellent writers/contributors. People will read the articles and come back, if the articles are very good.
My blog
JIVE has all the attributes you mention you want but are actually doing a good job at keeping everything free. They publish a nice color glossy too. You might check with their publisher about how they make their magazine tick. The ads aren't too bad there either.
This is reasonable advice. I'm not sure they have to accept it as a fait accompli, but this is probably reality for 99% of the Web sites out there.
This is bad advice. It's the suffering artist or martyr brand of creativity. I don't buy this at all. My Web sites are profitable, from nothing more than AdSense ads and donations. The trick is to know SEO, and the other trick is to value your own product. If you work to make your service valuable, and you behave accordingly, other people will value it too. This means you can't go to either extreme -- you can't hawk it like an auctioneer, and you can't be "meh" about convincing people of your worth. Attach a worth to services, and care enough to investigate and adjust until you find the optimal amount of income. If people express reluctance, find out why and cater to them. Most will consider at least some steps to be reasonable to keep a site going.
And care about the ads on your site. If you run AdSense or something else, you should be checking to be sure the ads are visible but not obnoxious, and you should care about the clickthrough rates. If the rates are too low, you should be fixing up your pages to help Google discover the proper ads. For example, if a high-traffic page about razor blades is running ads for roller blades, then the text on the page needs to be revised to make it more clear what is being discussed. Eventually, the ads adjust and become more accurate, and thus, have a better clickthrough. There are a million ways to SEO-optimize your site, and most will help your ad revenue too. You don't have to suffer for your art. You have to be proud of your art and care enough about your income to take action.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
I'ts "copyright", not "copywrite", so the past tense is "copyrighted", not "copywritten".
And if you don't think that "right" has a past tense, consider:
If a chair tips over and you set it back up, have you "written" the chair?
No, you've "righted" the chair.
To summarize: copyrighted, copyrighted, copyRIGHTED.
OK, I'm done now.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
The comment by the man from Ziff-Davis was really head on.
:)
You are trying to do too many things, cover too many areas, and have too many links and distractions on your site.
Also it would have been nice to have something for people to buy when you got your slashdotting.
One thing I can tell you straight off is get rid of Cafe Press. I was in San Diego at ComicCon and there was a seminar about how individual artists could make money on the net. One said DON'T use Cafe Press because they will rape you etc. In general they said you should source things locally and try to get a good deal there. Not that I imagine t-shirts and Google ads are really valuable to anyone. I would say you should stop in your tracks and get someone with experience to do a serious analysis of your business, create a new approach designed to make you cashflow, and execute it continually.
Also I really think (as the poster quoted above does) that you should focus on one scientific area if you can and go very deep, making personal connections to various research institutions. I never heard of your site even after 10 years of reading science on the net, and though I did add you to my sea of bookmarks, I'm not sure what is the compelling proposition. If you had an insiders report that periodically covered advances by many labs that would be more interesting, but I really hate the "warmed over" news idea of many sites (/. too). I don't want to hear you talking about "submissions", that's bull.
If you consider yourself professional journalists and want to get paid like them, then how about doing some journalism. Scrap the entire site and provide a single great original story every week. Hell, get on a plane (or hire a pro in the vicinity) and get some deep interviews with those nanotube ribbon researchers. Talk to others about what they think about that and where else these things are going. If you just made a nanoribbon journal and made yourselves important to researchers and/or businesspeople I think you could make money, get sponsorship, and provide an eminently useful service to people who want to pay for it.
I don't understand how you can make everything you create free and then complain about not making any money. Why aren't you already bankrupt? Not to sound nasty, I may indeed go back to your site if I remember it on a slow slashdot day (though my firefox personal menu bar is quite full..).
Okay, I just opened the url again (now I've memorized it's trnmag.com, a good start). I saw a link to books and thought, great! This is like MIT's OpenCourseware right? NO. First it talks about how you "secure a space on the physical bookshelf" in your office. What the heck is that? Why do I care about a shelf in your office if I'm on the net, which can hold unlimited numbers of books? Okay, I clicked on the biomimicry book, sounds interesting. It just takes me to a page at the Amazon bookstore where I can buy it. Where is the review you said would be there? Turns out it is just a SCAM that Amazon is probably paying you for my traffic. Screw that! Did you say professional journalism?
Now I open the Classifieds section. What could that be I wonder? It's more scam bullshit! Delete that annoying crap!
Okay let's talk about ads. The comic guys talked about some very interesting things. For one thing, one moderately successful guy carefully vets companies that want to advertise on his site and turns down a lot that are not appropriate in his mind. Then he is even harsher about companies for whom he makes a customer banner and page, since it gives that company some of his cachet. You need to learn about that. There is at least one person though making upwards of $1M per year with an online comic. The story wasn't completely discussed but they said merchandise was big. If you must have free content and you can create a high-involvement brand (which you don't have) then that is a possibility I suppose. For now how about focusing on improving your product, scrapping the distractions, and selling some of it.
Okay I've had enough. If your site was blank except for articles I would read it. As it stands, I have enough of an immunological reaction against it that I doubt I'll visit your site again.