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."
They had a successful run for awhile via subscriptions. High-quality writing was the main draw, as far as I know. Plus they had a teaser where they'd show the first part of the article to everyone.
Our costs are modest: two full-time editors, one contributing editor and two part-time staffers.
In other words, you have no full-time field reporters. You're not going out there and finding new stories, you're repackaging stuff from other sources.
If the world really needed more sites like that, maybe making a profit would not be so hard.
Independantly sell advertising for top spot banners and other links, if spots aren't bought up fill them with Adsense or other PPC advertising programs until they are
With a PR8 and that much traffic, you would have people lining up to buy text links alone to help them in the search engines. You must exploit all aspects of your site when trying to make revenue, not just the content.
Business Voyeur
If you have a third rate, cut-n-paste blog that somehow manages to get a high google ranking, you can exploit method 2 for $15,000 a month.
If you can disable cookies and use proxies, you can exploit method 1.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
There's only so much overhead that 200k/mo uniques can cover (I assume these are unique, domain-wide visitors, and not just PVs) when all you have on the front page is a tucked-away AdSense box. You are going to have to bite the bullet and put some banners and skyscrapers on your site if you want to survive. Slashdot does it, EFF.org does it...
You see, the gradual traffic growth on the Internet, fueled simply by more and more people having an Internet connection every, does not necessarily lead to increased traffic (and more revenue) for your site. The major hubs can and do find ways to keep those increasing numbers funnelling towards their domains. There's an intertial snowball effect as well.
If you don't have a dedicated employee pimping out your content, and at competitive prices; if you don't have sufficient ad presence on your pages; if you rely on natural market growth to provide increased revenue, you will very likely fail in the niche you have chosen.
I would strongly recommend appointing someone to whom you will have to grant more branding control than you would like. A cheerleader/publicist/marketer you appear to be lacking. And I would recommend aggressively pursuing sponsored bandwidth. Your site obviously has a lot of prestige, and I think it's past time to leverage that.
Good luck.
You're trying to pay 3 full-time and 2 part-time employees off a 200,000 hit per month non-commercial site?
You can't get your revenue high enough because your costs are too high. You can break even my increasing the money coming in or my reducing the money going out - the latter is far easier. There's no way you need 5 people for that kind of site.
Ah... I believe you're completely ignoring the concept of article SUBMISSIONS, by writers who ARE out in the field. Reading, rejecting, accepting, and editing article submissions is what editors get paid to do.
So unless you believe that every article in every magazine has to be written by a staff writer to be original, your assumption falls rather short of actual fact.
With "insights" like that, one can see why you post as an Anonymous Coward...
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Amen...
Let's not forget that every now and then you might see something on a banner ad that might interest you. I don't know how many times I've clicked a ThinkGeek ad (here) to check out a new or unknown product. Also, Google can make ads even more interesting with the power that Google has to connect two topics.
Right now I'm looking at one of their stories and it seems that maybe they should put the ad block (text list) in the actual paragraphs or move the vertical banners between the logo and text (make them horizontal too).
Ads annoy some people, but most of us have been looking at advertising all of our lives and accept it. Google's relevant ads even interest me on my own site - if it wasn't forbidden I'd click just to see where it leads me.
I must say that I often click on Google ads before any other type - sometimes knowing that it will help the site out a bit.
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