

Now Can We All Agree That The "High Quality Web Content" Experiment Has Failed? - ColinWright
http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/27/who-wouldve-thought-it-figures/

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_delirium
This hides a significant range of issues:

 _And, even on niche sites, the number of salable page impressions required to
even break even is huge._

What it means to "break even" varies a lot, though. It seems that the article
is focusing on large organizations with fairly large staff, a headquarters
building, etc. Basically the "online magazine" style of organization.

A niche publication with two or three full-time journalists working out of
their homes has a considerably different break-even point. For example, even
before he was bought out by the NYT, Nate Silver's fivethirtyeight.com was
more than breaking even, producing relatively low-volume (only a few articles
a week), high-quality niche content.

~~~
acangiano
You nailed the problem. It's absolutely possible, even easy, to break even
with a blog when the revenue has to pay a salary or two. Much less so when you
expect the blog or online magazine to pay for a whole staff of professionals.
I don't remember who, but someone popular blogged about this very issue. (A
Smart Bear? DHH?)

~~~
Mz
Anyone know of links to articles? I know it can be done, and I am thinking
more for a comic than blog, but I just need about $3k/mo. I keep getting told
I am delusional, that it can't be done. The evidence seems to be it can be
done, I'm just not sure how.

Thanks.

~~~
acangiano
I routinely make $3K/mo from my technical blogs, and I post infrequently,
dedicating a couple of hours a week to them. I'm writing a book to teach
people how to do the same (<http://technicalblogging.com>). I'm not saying
that making $3K from blogging is easy, but it can definitely be done if you
are serious about it. And if we are in the realm of full time writing done by
a professional journalist (as per the original article) it's not that hard.
You just need a solid idea, plan, and execution.

~~~
w1ntermute
What's your primary revenue stream?

~~~
acangiano
Affiliate offers. Sponsorships. Ads. In that order.

~~~
w1ntermute
Did you have preexisting contacts who were able to send affiliate offers and
sponsorships in your direction, or did you have to build up your reputation
from scratch when you started blogging?

If the latter, how did you do this? What mediums did you primarmily rely on
(email, Facebook, Twitter) and how long did it take for you to hit pay dirt? I
can imagine it's not easy getting the attention of good sponsors.

Was it one of those things were you were holding for a lucky break, or did you
have a gradual buildup to success?

------
pessimizer
I think the problem is a bit deeper than that: I think that journalism as a
product rather than as advocacy has failed. There are hundreds of amazing free
blogs out there, surviving on donations from people who appreciate their
existence and/or sacrifices from people who think it's worth it to be heard.
It's idea capitalism, and just because you have half a billion dollars to
spend doesn't mean that people will want to read you any more than Bill from
Baltimore.

A criticism of that point of view is often that good journalism needs the
money to send journalists into the field. I think that point of view forgets
what journalists are by function - a way to connect people to other people; a
technical problem. If we can make sure that anyone who wants to be heard can
speak somewhere where everyone who wants to hear them can, we're done. The
network effects implied by that will probably shift through a lot of stable
configurations in future, but none of them will be effected at all by simple
distribution monopolies. Computer networking and mobile are changing
everything.

Product journalism is even newer than commercial music, and will also end up
in the history books as a relic of the 500 year period on history where the
kinks in the mass reproduction and distribution of words, images, and sounds
were being worked out. Then we move on to touch:)

~~~
revscat
I came in here to post "Wikileaks" as a rebuttal to OP, but I see you have it
covered.

~~~
svnk
Oh, you mean like how Wikileaks shut itself down for a few weeks until its
donation ransom was met?

------
rpedroso
Magazines like Slate want to believe two things:

1\. Customers are unwilling to pay for high-quality content

2\. It costs a lot to produce high-quality content.

Both are wrong. Many people would happily pay for high-quality content if they
had to pay for it. Newspapers and magazines were hugely successful for years
before the internet.

The real problem is #2. The internet has drastically lowered the barrier to
entry for experts to publish content. Some of the best information I got on
timely content, like Libya and Fukishima, were from blogs that I am unlikely
to ever read again. People freely publish information every day about any
subject you can imagine, and it keeps me quite satisfied.

I'm not unwilling to pay because I'm a stubborn scrooge, I'm unwilling to pay
because I don't need to pay!

That said, there are plenty of content distributors who do well thanks to
advertising. High-quality blogging can also server as a marketing tool,
drawing potential consumers through viral and search marketing. The SEO
industry (e.g. SEOmoz) produce very, very good content because it allows them
to sell their tools!

Yeah, there are some absolutely terrific writers that I'm going to miss, but
I'm really worse-off for it.

~~~
lotharbot
The internet has also lowered the barrier to _finding_ high-quality, timely
content. The best information I got regarding Libya and Fukishima, I found
because it made the frontpage of Hacker News. I don't need to pay an
information curator/gatekeeper because the upvotes are doing a pretty nice job
of that already.

That said, when my income is a little more steady I expect to subscribe to
Stratfor [0], because they offer a depth of content that's hard to find
elsewhere. There are viable free alternatives to a lot of content on the web,
but I haven't yet found one for that particular set of content.

[0] <http://www.stratfor.com/> \- strategic forecasting

~~~
Fluxx
This is a _huge_ point that I think is often overlooked. Not only is it
cheaper to write and distribute content to the entire world, it's also cheaper
and easier to curate all that content and offer a page full of links to it.
Newspapers/reporters also served that function as well - going through all the
news of the day to find the most interesting and relevant things to report on.

------
Hyena
Is it? I see lots of high quality content all over the web, particularly as
blogging has picked up ever more people who are prominent in academic fields.

I think this should be re-titled "Can We All Agree That The Webmag Experiment
Has Failed"?

Or possibly: "Let's All Agree That We Only Ever Read One or Two Articles Out
of Most Magazines and Then Only Because We Were Stuck In Phoenix's Airport: To
Be Perfectly Honest, We'd Never Read 'The Economist' or 'Harvard Business
Review' Otherwise".

~~~
davidw
I read most of The Economist every week, although sometimes I do tend to skip
a few articles in the Britain and Asia sections.

~~~
Hyena
I used to read The Economist on a regular basis as well, along with FP and FA.
But over time, it has lost a lot of its appeal, being steadily replaced by
blogging academics and research papers for me. All those mags serve a sort of
middle ground between research and journalism, my reading habits have moved to
a more polarized model.

~~~
crdoconnor
I tried doing this for a while, but actually, it's hard work picking out blogs
that do good writing, and thoughtful/incisive commentary.

Plus, when you find ones that do, they invariably only keep it up for a few
months to a year because it's so much damn hard work to write and research
well.

Much easier just to pluck an economist of the shelves at the bookstore than to
continually refresh your rss feeds.

------
j_baker
_Meantime, it would be petty of me to name those of our rivals in the
technology blogosphere who have embraced bullshit slideshows and top ten lists
over their more costly cousins: actual fucking reporting._

It would be petty of me to name startup blogs that are sensationalist and
link-baiting, but claim to be the _real_ journalists in Silicon Valley.

------
abhip
when most consumers want to find something, they do a search. for that most go
to google. they dont go to the economist. they dont go to HBR. as a result, if
search is done right (quality results), free high quality web content will be
found, read, shared, and read again. but there is no loyalty built there for
the news source's brand. very few publications will get the status that the
economist, wsj, or nytimes enjoy.

~~~
hammock
We used to be loyal to the Economist, WSJ, NYTimes to bring us quality
content. Now, we are loyal to google.

~~~
aerique
So would search engines specializing on a certain field be the replacement?
Search engines tweaking their code to a niche like astronomy, code
(DuckDuckGo), fashion, classical music, etc.

Because Google has started to fail as a general search engine. Then again the
abovementioned hypothetical search engines would be as much suspect to fail-
by-SEO.

Anyway, niche search engines as a replacement to the traditional publishers.
Just thinking aloud.

~~~
Hyena
There was talk about this a while back, the need to go back to the curated
list idea of the 1990s in order to reduce SEO spam.

------
flocial
It's funny that TechCrunch, a blog turned into a multimillion dollar
acquisition from scratch, would assert this. Yet they say, "The fact that the
Economist’s North American circulation has just reached its highest ever level
tells us that the audience for quality content isn’t going away."

The bar for what used to pass as "quality" is much higher now. You need to
bring your A-game to compete with "amateurs" including everyone from armchair
pundits to tenured academics. Plus, people have to basically give up on
following everything. Gone are the days when you can read a select number of
publications to stay updated on the subjects of the day. That's why we're all
hanging out here right? We want more filters.

When I make time to read The Economist from cover to cover, it's brilliant but
after a while I'm drowning so I need to take a break on the shore and just
skim headlines on the various aggregators.

I'd argue that it's not just high quality content but high quality filters
that people want as well.

------
protomyth
I think the lesson is that no one has implemented a micro-payment platform
that is usable / widespread enough to make a go of it. Credit card fees are
killing the idea of buying content at the 5 or 10 cent level.

~~~
Pheter
Perhaps there is a market for some kind of service that allows you to make
small 5 or 10 cent charges. All of these charges are grouped together and you
make a payment at the end of the month in one go so the the fees are reduced.

Or it could work the other way round, you top up your 'account' with amounts
from, let's say, $10 upwards.

This could be monetized by charging businesses to integrate your service into
their products.

~~~
michaelchisari
I had an idea for a startup around this, and got pretty far in spec'ing it out
and seeing what could be done. But what I found, when reading about previous
attempts, was that the technical and business side weren't the barrier to
entry, it was the legal problems that arose. Whenever systems like this have
popped up, it's a matter of days before organized crime and others game the
system to do things like launder money.

It's unfortunate, but it seems as though the only entities with the legal and
administrative teams capable of handling that are the credit card companies.
And they're not particularly interested in micro-payments, it seems.

~~~
jacques_chester
I agree that organised crime is the main adversary to such a system, but I
believe I have developed a miraculous mix of technology to thwart them that
this margin is unfortunately too narrow to contain.

------
cHalgan
Actually this is the end of news papers and any form of newspaper
conglomerates on internet. Things like Techcrunch, HuffPost are transitions
toward the new model.

It seems the future is that consumers will want to read content written by a
particular writer not from some conglomerate site. That writer (blogger,
scientist, professor, etc.) will be able to monetize.

~~~
xtracto
You make an excellent point. I used to read Joel Spolsky and Russinovich's
blog quite often. I would actually _pay_ to do this.

The main problem (and difference) I see with Blogs vs traditional journals is
the editors. The majority of blogs from technologists, scientists and the like
do not have an editor at hand. This reduces the writing quality of their
articles.

Now may be a good time to setup a business connecting "editors" with writers.

------
michaelpinto
I think you can call wikipedia a "high quality web content experiment" that
has done quite well. The catch is one needs to figure out: \- How to create
high quality on a low budget? \- How to make sure it appeals to a larger
audience? \- How to let that audience find you? \- And how to monetize said
content?

To me the market is still evolving, but I'm excited about the idea of people
paying for eBooks and apps — something that wouldn't have seemed possible in a
Napster world before iTunes.

------
michaelchisari
Let me subscribe to an ad-free version of your online magazine for $0.50 to $2
a month, please.

------
RealGeek
I haven't bought any magazine or newspaper since I bought iPad.

Online content monetization is in a bad state at the moment. Advertising CPMs
continue to decline and most users won't pay for content.

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shalmanese
Slate & the NYT Magazine are the only mainstream news sources I have in my RSS
reader. I certainly don't read everything but I think it's important to at
least glance at the headline to every article they publish.

I'm sad Jack Shafer, Timothy Noah and June Thomas are now all gone as they
were all wonderful writers :(.

------
beatpanda
Keeping Paul Carr on staff is a great example of ethically dubious methods
online magazines resort to for page views.

------
DanielBMarkham
Radio fundamentally changed the nature of how we relate to music.

In the same manner, the web is fundamentally changing the way we relate to
printed material. Both of these changes took decades to happen. I imagine
we've got another decade or two left before it all shakes out.

