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The Media The Internet

Wanted - An Online Publishing Business Model? 171

Posted by Cliff
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."
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Wanted - An Online Publishing Business Model? More

Wanted - An Online Publishing Business Model?

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  • Obligatory (Score:5, Funny)

    by XanC ( 644172 ) on Saturday August 20, 2005 @02:25PM (#13362847)
    Try advertizing on Slashdot!
    • 1. Publish things online. 2. ???? 3. Profit

    • Re:Obligatory (Score:3, Interesting)

      by BoldAC ( 735721 )
      He just did advertise on slashdot! For free.

      He is greatly mistaken by the amount of traffic that he belives he has. Compare the alexa data at trmag [alexa.com] with the alexa data for tech-recipes.com. [alexa.com]

      Tech-recipes.com [tech-recipes.com] takes all their "profits" and sends t-shirts to its users. Nobody there is making a living off the site... I don't know how you expect to either.

      Sorry. Traffic is the answer.

      (Don't whine that alexa traffic isn't accurate. It isn't. However, the same people that will install alexa toolbar as the sam
      • Dude, I know you said not to whine about the inaccuracies of Alexa, but I had to check for myself. I have a website that gets about 100 pageviews per day right now.

        We are ranked at about 1900 (better than either above site by a WIDE margin). Something is majorly wrong there!
    • JIVE [jivemagazine.com] 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.

  • Ask Salon (Score:3, Insightful)

    by meditation_dude ( 907877 ) on Saturday August 20, 2005 @02:26PM (#13362848) Homepage
    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.
    • I asked Salon. They said:
      Get a shitload of venture capital money. Then blow it on expensive office space and posh parties.
      You can probably ignore that last part.

  • Useless (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20, 2005 @02:26PM (#13362850)
    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.

    • Re:Useless (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Golias ( 176380 )
      Bingo.

      Anonymous Coward posts like that are the reason I still read at 0.
    • Think of it as evolution in action. Economics is worth listening to sometimes. Lots of us operate weblogs and percieve the difference between a hobby and a business. If we wanted to be serious journalists, we'd sell our homes and cars and take an oath of poverty and go full time.

      Bruce

      • Re:Useless (Score:3, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        The link in your sig goes to... Internal Server Error

        • The link in your sig goes to... Internal Server Error

          I'm glad that someone else is getting this as well; I though that it might be just me.
          I was in the middle of creating a login account at technocrat.net, and had just hit the submit button, and these errors started popping up.
          I thought that it was something that I did (maybe the signup process doesn't like spaces in user names?), and that it was screwing up only for me.
          It's been broken now for a day or so.

      • Economics is worth listening to sometimes.

        You mean, I shouldn't post to Slashdot asking, "Wanted: Business model for bumming around the house all day whilst buying cool geek toys!"?

        You are, of course, entirely correct. I see so many people who are outraged that their noble cause in the face of any business sense doesn't get to somehow work. Just because you decide you want to set up a nicer, gentler way of doing things than an existing business - even if it does feel that should be a better way - doesn't en

      • Re:Useless (Score:4, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20, 2005 @04:54PM (#13363432)
        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.
    • 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.


      Yeah, that would never work [slashdot.org]!

    • submissions (Score:5, Insightful)

      by shmlco ( 594907 ) on Saturday August 20, 2005 @04:22PM (#13363301) Homepage
      "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."

      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...

      • Don't use his posting status to try to defensively invalidate his point. If the category of material on the site can be had other places for free, people won't pay for it. End of story. Oh, you can argue that "it's unique content etc." but if people would rather use bugmenot than register with the Times for free, you're going to have a hell of a time getting paid.

        The best bet I've found is licensing the content to other, better circulated outlets. I've seen people pay decent cash for articles that are p

  • Business Plan... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MosesJones ( 55544 ) on Saturday August 20, 2005 @02:27PM (#13362855) Homepage

    Sorry to be cynical here but they are running AdSense and need to raise more revenue....

    Q: "How can we get a load more hits"
    A: "Get a slashdotting"

    How exactly is this news for nerds, rather than "Advertising for a Web Business".

    • Re:Business Plan... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by ergo98 ( 9391 )
      Sorry to be cynical here but they are running AdSense and need to raise more revenue....

      Especially given that their way of boosting Adsense revenue was to place more Adsense banners on each page (ridiculously placing three vertical banner Adsense ads side by side. This technique would be logical if they were paid by impression, but for a pay for click it's self defeating).

      The reality, however, is that the sort of generalist technology stories they write, appealing to the interested lay person, will yield ne
      • Adsense only works if
        1. You're engaging in click fraud
        2. Your visitors don't realize they're clicking on an ad

        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.

        • 2. Your visitors don't realize they're clicking on an ad

          mininova.org achives #2 absolutely brilliantly - a friend of a friend has accidentally clicked on the dynamically expanding ads on that site probably several dozen times (as the ad expands right into the space of the link you're about to click).
      • Well, I have nearly 200K visitors a month too and I can't even get a living for myself. So TRN isnt doing that bad. But their subject is of course more commercial than mine (free classical downloads).

        That said I miss all the obvious advertising for an IT site (IBM, Microsoft, SAP, Dell, etc.). There is a lot money going around in IT, but you won't find it all with only Google Adsense. Maybe they should look at the more commercial IT sites to get an idea of which advertisements they are missing.
    • If that's right, they're incompetent fools! What kind of sad bastard checks Slashdot on a Saturday evening?!

      Oh.

      As Emily Litella said... never mind.

    • Re:Business Plan... (Score:5, Informative)

      by mutewinter ( 688449 ) on Saturday August 20, 2005 @02:48PM (#13362944)
      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 ;)
      • I completely second that. Adsense makes a painfully small amount of money unless you get a ridiculous amount of hits. I get hit by The pirate bay [thepiratebay.org] every time I post a torrent (I post info/screenshots pages) and the thousands of hits add up to 40 cents here and there when someone buys something expensive through an ad.
        • I think you missed the point of the post.. Slashdot traffic isn't worth much. I have other sites that will do over $100 per thousand hits -- because its valuable targetted traffic.
        • "I completely second that. Adsense makes a painfully small amount of money unless you get a ridiculous amount of hits. I get hit by The pirate bay [thepiratebay.org] every time I post a torrent (I post info/screenshots pages) and the thousands of hits add up to 40 cents here and there when someone buys something expensive through an ad."

          The irony here is killing me. It's not just the number of hits, it depends on the popularity/desirability (from the adwords advertiser auction point of view) of the keyword(
    • They already have a Google Rank of 8/10. They don't need a single /.'ing. They need to make money off what they already have.

    • Re:Business Plan... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Seumas ( 6865 ) * on Saturday August 20, 2005 @02:59PM (#13363001)
      I have to agree that this ask-slashdot question is silly.

      Either do it or don't do it and stop bitching about the money. I run a big auction site and I probably could charge fees or membership dues or something to make money, but I don't. Just because you want to make money at something - or do it for a living - doesn't mean you can or will.

      So my advice to these guys would be:

      Get a day job. Focus on your career. Do the journalism website thing in your free time as a hobby. Don't expect to make a career out of it. In fact, don't expect to make any money out of it whatsoever. Actually - plan to spend serious cash going into debt over your project without ever recovering the expense. I"ve suck at least $25,000 into my project in the last six or seven years and I don't make a dime from it. I never expect that I will. In fact, I don't even care if it's popular or not. Everyone can just go away and stop using it and find another service for all I really care.

      If you're doing it for any other reason than you like spending your time on it - give up and stop it right now. You will never enjoy what you do if your enjoyment depends on someone else putting up some cash. Because they never will.

      And while I'm at it - be wary of anyone offering to help you out. I've had people offer to buy my site and keep me on "staff" to run it from the creative/coding end of things and let them "handle the business side". Um. it's a free site. There is no business side. I question the help of anyone who thinks there is a business side to it.

      I actually did finally start accepting advertising - but only after five years of having a policy against it. And that was just because I was tired of spending a big chunk of my paycheck on it if I could maybe easily avoid it... but I would have kept paying if I had to, I guess.

      • Re:Business Plan... (Score:4, Informative)

        by Anthony Boyd ( 242971 ) on Sunday August 21, 2005 @03:13AM (#13365426) Homepage
        Get a day job. Focus on your career. Do the journalism website thing in your free time as a hobby. Don't expect to make a career out of it.

        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.

        Actually - plan to spend serious cash going into debt over your project without ever recovering the expense. I"ve suck at least $25,000 into my project in the last six or seven years and I don't make a dime from it. I never expect that I will.

        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.

    • Umm, you're assuming that someone actually clicked the links in the writeup. Does anyone actually do that anymore?
    • Yep, adsense is not the answer for their site.

      They need something like this: http://www.inetinteractive.com/advertising/index.h tml?site=webhostingtalk [inetinteractive.com]

      Download the 'media pack' that tells prospective advertisers all about the site and how many people will see the adverts.

      If you take WHT, they say $20 CPM for a basic ad, with 8 million impressions I make that about $160k. If doing your own adverts is too hard, get a 3rd party to deliver adverts for you, adjuggler or adsense or someone.

      so, first get paid per
    • Increase revenues while reducing expenses without losing quality. Ok, that's a tautology, I'll be more specific. Plan to fire somebody. Are your staff stakeholders/best friends/family, or just employees? If employees, use the site to find them a better job, while outsourcing their work to india/russia/college interns.
      Alternative model, use your employees as temps; hire them out for tech writing contracts that cover their pay.
      Revenue models: you are selling google ads and tshirts and classifieds and have a d

  • More ads (Score:5, Informative)

    by fsterman ( 519061 ) on Saturday August 20, 2005 @02:28PM (#13362862) Homepage
    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.
    • You have one tiny Google Ads box. While ads can be annoying, just choose non-annoying ads.
      You mean there are still people who don't have AdBlock installed?
      • Yea. The other 99.9981% of us out there.
      • yep, the ones of us who realise that advertising is what keeps many sites free. Registration is bad enough to keep me away from most sites that require it, imagine how useless the web would become if you had to subscribe instead.

        • Re:More ads (Score:4, Insightful)

          by ImaLamer ( 260199 ) <john.lamar@gma[ ]com ['il.' in gap]> on Saturday August 20, 2005 @06:22PM (#13363737) Homepage Journal
          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.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Out of curiosity, how can you tell what a site's page rank is?

      jf

  • Advice (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Sv-Manowar ( 772313 ) on Saturday August 20, 2005 @02:32PM (#13362882) Homepage Journal
    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.

  • How about hiring a marketer? (Score:4, Funny)

    by coflow ( 519578 ) on Saturday August 20, 2005 @02:38PM (#13362904)
    You're asking /. readers for advice on marketing? you must be new here......

  • Never too much... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Rekrapt ( 813221 )

    That's a lot of revenue streams, but they don't add up to enough.

    You can NEVER have too many revenue streams. Everybody complains about too much advertising... people do it because it works. Let them bitch. They'll come back if you are giving them what they want... pop-ups, flash banner ads or not. Make it clear you want their freaking money and be done with it.

    Put a big, fat PAYPAL DONATE button and every single page. Link to every piece of crap you can think of that your visitors might be interested

    • > Capitalism Rules.

      So does privoxy.

    • You can NEVER have too many revenue streams. Everybody complains about too much advertising... people do it because it works. Let them bitch. They'll come back if you are giving them what they want... pop-ups, flash banner ads or not. Make it clear you want their freaking money and be done with it.

      No, they will install AdBlock, enable popup blocking, and not have to deal with the graffiti. If they find a way to get around these measures then they will lose readers because the experience of popups and web

  • sell ads (Score:5, Informative)

    by Alex P Keaton in da ( 882660 ) on Saturday August 20, 2005 @02:42PM (#13362915) Homepage
    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.

    • Consultant Fee Please (Score:3, Interesting)

      by linzeal ( 197905 )
      Why are we giving advice on businesses online anyway? Shouldn't we paid for this crap?

      I have one word of advice you need to dig through all your stories and find those that offer services or products that are sold online and find out if there is a sweet deal directly from the company if you refer them. When most of your articles are static there is no reason to use Adsense on that page. Adsense is great and all if you are lazy or have a dynamic site but if you have an article on "foobar" and foobar's

  • you're asking slashdot for an online publishing business model...

  • The site is craptacularly html-coded, too. This is just a ploy to get /.'d.

  • Re-do your website (Score:4, Interesting)

    by FiReaNGeL ( 312636 ) <`moc.liamtoh' `ta' `l3gnaerif'> on Saturday August 20, 2005 @02:54PM (#13362969) Homepage
    The website is a mess to navigate. Visiting the homepage, it's not even obvious what the website is about. And why should I care. And it fill past my browser window even if im in 1024 resolution. 3x Google Adsense Wide Skyscrapers at the bottom? Please redo your ad placement, your CTR will improve greatly.

    It could make millions with 200 000 uniques a month :(
  • A cloud of fairies [penny-arcade.com] brings you golden coins. Make sure you have enough to pay the billy goats gruff!

  • Your ad placement almost seems like a joke... (Score:5, Informative)

    by HarryCaul ( 25943 ) on Saturday August 20, 2005 @03:05PM (#13363021)

    "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.

  • Sponsored bandwidth, ads, and marketing yourself (Score:4, Insightful)

    by stonedonkey ( 416096 ) on Saturday August 20, 2005 @03:10PM (#13363038)
    Publishing (1) a for-profit niche journal about (2) technology on (3) the Internet, with (4) two full-time eds and three part-timers... Respectfully, I'm surprised you've been able to last as long as you have in such a competitive category, without aggressive marketing. I consider myself a pretty heavy Internet user, for about fifteen years now, and I've never heard of your publication.

    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...

    ...And you'll notice that EFF.org's bandwidth is sponsored. Hardocp.com gets its bandwidth sponsored by theplanet.com. These sites get at least one order of magnitude of traffic more than you, and yet they can find someone to cover the bandwidth bills. I think you can too -- you just haven't been looking.

    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.

  • That's funny, I don't see any adverts on your site at all.

    Ohhhh.. that's right. I've got an adblock list a mile long.

  • 200 000? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by zxSpectrum ( 129457 ) on Saturday August 20, 2005 @03:33PM (#13363124) Homepage Journal

    Looking at the Alexa traffic details [alexa.com] for your site, I somehow doubt that you have a real userbase of 200 000. Compare it to for instance kottke.org's traffic details [alexa.com], I'd say that you need visitors before anything else. Kottke has loads of more traffic, and took a hefty paycut to blog full-time

    And yes, I am aware that Alexa is not an exact measure, but it should act as an indication that you very likely won't find a business model at all that is fit for supporting a full-time staff.

    As for maximizing revenue with what you have, the colors and placement of your Google ads is pretty appaling: They are below the fold for many users, and they are hidden where users won't look for them, and they have a color scheme as inviting as a World-War II bunker.

    • The Alexa details are based off spyware - spyware you download intentionally, but spyware all the same. They're a technical website, so I would expect their users not to choose to download spyware. I think their own stats are far more reliable.
    • You make a good point. He has a very similar traffic graph as a web site I run, which has 90,000 uniques per month (as measured by Tribal Fusion.) I think his 200,000 number is not entirely accurate.

    • Odd, I get connection refused when I try to get to alexa. I wonder is it my IP block for some reason, or that I'm using mozilla? Could they be taking a "no looking at our website unless you get our BHO" policy? :D

  • I've been doing Netsurfer Digest [netsurf.com] for 11 years. We were originally free, and now we charge $20/year for a subscription.

    I'm the editor, not the publisher, so I can't release financial details, but I can say that if you don't do it for love, you shouldn't do it at all.

  • Sack someone (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Tango42 ( 662363 ) on Saturday August 20, 2005 @03:45PM (#13363169)
    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.
  • aren't there highly paid consultants that answer questions like this? heheh.
  • Your donations page pretty much stops anyone willing to donate less than $10 from donating at all, and asking for donations of $200 or more dollars just makes those considering small donations not bother because it doesn't seem worth it. You're unlikely to get more than a couple of donations of more than $100, your many money will come from $10 donations and below - encorage those.
  • Here's what to do: 1) Ad banners to your articles. 2) Create a Press Release section where companies can submit PR's for a small fee ($5-$10) and if its good enough you might just write about it. This should help

  • No (Score:2)

    by teslatug ( 543527 )
    No, there really isn't much room left for an independent, commercial online publisher. If you want to make money you have to cater to the people willing to give money. You have to represent their interests (ala Fox) and/or entertain them (ala CNN). If you want to do good, independent journalism, go non-profit (ala Wikinews).

  • Common Mistakes (Score:5, Informative)

    by sjvn ( 11568 ) <sjvn AT vna1 DOT com> on Saturday August 20, 2005 @04:25PM (#13363307) Homepage
    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/ [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/ [eweek.com]
    Editor, Practical Technology (http://www.practical-tech.com/ [practical-tech.com]
    Chairman, Internet Press Guild (http://www.netpress.org/ [netpress.org]

  • According to alexa.com:
    Traffic Rank for trnmag.com: 155,360
    Traffic Rank for seifried.org: 148,844
    Traffic Rank for slashdot.org: 1,134
    Traffic Rank for cnn.com: 28

    Now people will say Alexa.com isn't accurate/etc/etc and I would agree. However in this case it's showing my personal website and a web site with commercial aspirations to be about equal (actually I outrank it, sweet! =). And of course it shows Slashdot clobbering us, and in turn CNN clobbering .. well nearly everyone.

    I get a click thr

  • I've read TRN for a few years... so obviously, I like your content. I wondered from day one where you were getting your money...
    I agree that you can devote more of the page to advertising... For example the whole right column is ads on many free information sites.

    First things first: Find out about your audience demographics. Demographics is what sells targeted advertising. Clicks sold is less 1% of the world's advertising. A lot of advertising is geared towards garnering brand recognition in a targe

  • With all the other people saying "duh, adverts of course", I'll play the devil's advocate.

    Consider "adblock" and its probable descendants. I'd lay even odds they'll utterly wipe out bulk advertizing on the web before 2010. Advertizers will try stealth, and be beaten back by collaborative and statistical filters. There's no way they can win that arms race when the browser-side does the rendering. You may be able to duck the blow by carefully choosing innoccuous and relevant ad providers - or even they may fa
  • WeblogsInc makes a million a year on AdSense alone (Google for the interview). Gawker Media makes very good money and was entirely bootstrapped. These two companies are making it, and making a nice pile of money to boot.
  • Since you're actually creating content, you know as much as anybody who hangs out at Slashdot. We mostly sit around bitching about the quality of content that's out there.

    Let's run through the funding options again. Oddly enough, these are the same as for traditional media:

    • Advertising. Online advertising can work, as any Google stockholder will tell you. But there's a finite number of advertising dollars. Clearly not enough for everybody who would like to sell ads.
    • Subscriptions.I keep hearing people

  • Summary in ten points (Score:5, Informative)

    by pieterh ( 196118 ) on Saturday August 20, 2005 @07:11PM (#13363913) Homepage
    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.

  • Here's a solution:

    The government allows eCash. The government must be involved so that the money can be universal. eCash should be world-wide, so other governments must agree.

    You put $10 into eCash using your credit card, and get $10 of eCash minus the credit card companies' hefty cut of all credit card commerce.

    You could put money into eCash by asking your bank to transfer the money.

    When you visit a web page, you pay 1 cent, $0.01, to view a page. Or, maybe 1/10 cent, $0.001.

    The online media
  • Get an agency to sell ads for you. You aren't good at it.

  • LWN? (Score:2)

    by tjw ( 27390 )
    Wanted: an online publishing business model that falls somewhere between lone weblogger and corporate media behemoth.

    LWN.net seems to be quite successful in selling subscriptions.

    Forget about ads, the key is quality. The quality and consistency of jornalism is enough to squeeze subscription fees out of even the cheapest of cheapskates (a.k.a. me).

    • Forget about ads, the key is quality

      Yes, and IMHO they could go a long way towards it by not using Gartner as an authoritative source on their front page. TCO indeed!

  • Patronage. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by neo ( 4625 ) on Saturday August 20, 2005 @10:50PM (#13364675)

    A short patronizing history

    Before the growth of the merchant class, nobility used their money, power, and influence to promote ideas through the use of patronage. If they favored an artist, philosopher, musician, writers, orator, scientist or even a jester, they would patronize them and in this way their ideas would flourish. The patrons, who were often egotistical, would take credit for the ideas and would circulate them to further their own fame.

    After the growth of the merchant class, nobility lost sole control over money, power and influence and patronage was partially replaced with commerce. Artists, philosophers, musicians, writers, orators, scientists and even jesters were forced to please many people instead of just one in order to survive. Spreading their creative ideas became much harder because they did not have the money, power, or influence of the nobility.

    With the advent of marketing artists, philosophers, musicians, writers, orators, scientists, and even jesters were forced to associate with advertisers, distributors, branders, promoters and other middlemen in order to reach an audience. In essence these marketers became the new patrons.

    So ideally what you want is for your readers to patronize you. That means they get some kind of control over what you make. Give them a method to directly influence your content in exchange for currency.

    This really isn't as bad as it sounds. I'll give you two quick examples:

    Make a list of potential articles that you want to report on. Rather than have your editor pick which he thinks your audience wants to read, allow your own readers to vote on them. Each vote costs $1. The highest voted article ideas get written.

    Other things your readers want control over that you can get them to pay for... let them give you ideas for articles, for $1. Let them assign writers for article ideas, for $1.

    Basically you have what no newspaper or magazine ever had, which is direct contact with your readers. Let them pay you to give you feedback on what they want from you.
  • Put the Google Ads at the top of the RH column where they can be seen and clicked on. That will make a considerable difference. Have a subscription system similar to that used by Linux Weekly News.
  • Come on own up, how much did you get?
  • I have been downloading the Canadian Globe and Mail newspaper into my Palm for a couple of years now. I sent them some money because I think the service was great. They almost sent it back because they didn't know how this cheque was supposed to be entered into the General Ledger.

    My Journal Entry describing incident [slashdot.org]

    -AD

  • Ad revenue is a zero sum game-- one site's gain is another site's loss. As a niche publication with low viewership compared to real news sites, you can't expect untargeted advertising to pay for your staff. You're going to need to go to a subscription model to have any chance. And if people offer free shit on their blogs that even remotely challenges the quality of your site, why would anyone pay? There are already thousands of similar sites on the internet and I think you are going to have a very diffi
  • 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.
  • TidBITS [tidbits.com] sounds similar: a Web magazine staffed by a small number of paid journalists/editors. On their site, and in various magazine articles (e.g. the ones about their subscription model) they explain in a fair amount of detail how they finance their operation.

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