
Gigaom: The Life and Death of a Venture-Funded Media Startup - sayemm
https://medium.com/@michaelwolf/gigaom-the-life-and-death-of-a-venture-funded-media-startup-eb3fbdc4e732
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shubhamjain
I find surprising that sites like Gigaom and Dr. Dobbs which actually try to
provide value to their users with original content, die because their ad
revenues are not suffice to cover up their costs, while site like Buzzfeed,
filled with clickbaity headlines, and dumb articles, pass $100M in
revenues[1].

Perhaps, it seems like 'content-is-the-king' is not optimal if you are looking
for revenues.

[1]:
[http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/media/2014/11/8557366/...](http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/media/2014/11/8557366/buzzfeed-
passes-100-m-revenue-2014)

~~~
Throwaway90283
Why is it surprising?

It's faster and cheaper to write clickbait articles, and they have a wider
appeal. People are much more likely to click and share something with the
name, 'What Disney character are you?' or 'Top 10 reasons you should start
going out on Tuesday nights', compared to anything on Gigaom. It takes a lot
of time to write proper articles, to check the facts, to follow up with
sources, and to maintain a respectable reputation.

I'm sure they could trim the fat, and maintain a small group of dedicated
writers, pay the bills and make a living. However, they raised quite a bit of
money, so they kind of need to go big or die at this point, and going big is
not easy for the reasons I mentioned above.

~~~
toni
The kind of people paying for Janes.com or AviationWeek can also get all their
news for free from MilitaryNews.com or such, but still, these sites continue
to flourish and they are only growing because having an AviationWeek
subscription is a "status". The kind of niche that was reading the old,
industry-centric GigaOm would have no problem paying for such a subscription.

~~~
dagw
The huge difference is that I imagine that the vast majority of people
subscribing to Janes don't do it with their own money, and as such aren't very
price sensitive. I imagine that mosy people subscribing to GigaOm are almost
certainly doing it with their own money.

Also IHS (the people who publish Janes) have a whole host of other products
and well as consulting services, so they can easily afford to run Janes.com at
a small loss as part of their marketing budget.

~~~
toni
I agree that Janes' subscribers are using their corporate credit cards to pay
the subscription costs, but I also think that Gigaom had the potentials to
walk into the same path.

Take a look at the first screenshot in the story[1], Om Malik describes the
site in 2006 as a "broadband weblog". The kind of quality articles on Gigaom
were not comparable with link-baity nature of TechCrunch/Mashable or
Engadget/Gizmodo. They could have been the Janes of IT industry if they wanted
to. Or at least be as affordable as the AviationWeek.

Notice someone on this thread is describing Gigaom as "boring", I take that as
a compliment about the fact that the site was very industry-centric and devoid
of click-baity stories.

[1]
[https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/896/1*ajvdVfFtBytF...](https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/896/1*ajvdVfFtBytFKyKXXJ1sfQ.png)

~~~
dagw
_could have been the Janes of IT industry_

Which part of Janes? If you look at the whole portfolio of service offered by
iHS, then they are much closer to something like Gartner Group than a
publishing house. I imagine that the real money comes from writing custom
reports and consulting work, with the high technical and very expensive years
books coming in second. Their books and magazines are probably as much a
marketing tool as a revenue stream.

------
thrownnaway
I found this article frustrating for its avoidance of assigning blame or fault
to any of the decisions described.

For example: It seems pretty clear that a bunch of work was done on a research
product for GigaOm, but their thinking around it was very off target. $79/year
is less than a Netflix account costs. Yet, the author doesn't come out and say
"and this proved to be a big mistake."

GigaOm sounds like a scenario where people were "playing startup" for several
years and eventually reality set in. They appear to have never been
profitable, yet they acquired a company, took out a disastrous loan and raised
more and more money. From what I'm reading in articles like this, the people
running GigaOm sound like they made a lot of dumb decisions, yes, but it also
sounds like GigaOm was never really a real business at any point.

~~~
puranjay
Agreed and agreed. Some of those sound like classic pre dot-com crash moves.
Offices in Manhattan and SF? Do you really need that? 22 writers, sales staff,
developers...Honestly, you could run an operation similar to GigaOm for 1/3rd
of the cost.

------
ghaff
Not clear from this or other pieces I've read how much of the downfall had to
do with the news part of the business although--as others have said--the cost
structure may have been relatively high and the traffic, compared to
clickbaity and more consumer-oriented sites, was relatively low. What does
seem to have been the case from this piece and one or two others is that there
was a lot of pressure to grow the research side of the business and they were
"investing" a lot to do this.

In my experience, their research was a bit of a mixed bag. They were trying
new business models with primarily a lot of freelancers. Some of it worked.
Some of it didn't. They had some smart folks in their stable who did a nice
job for a reasonable cost doing things like webinars. Let's just say other
dealings weren't as positive.

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london888
I think Gigaom had a harder time competing in an ever-increasing market
against sites like HN end even Quora where the comments (especially here in
HN) I often find insightful.

I wonder if Om had returned to the helm, cut staff/costs, and made Gigaom much
more about his own preoccupations and interests, that would have worked
better.

I liked the 'world of Om' a lot and I think this has potential for attracting
an audience. Maybe all it needs is 2-3 staff members if that.

Kind of a Gruber/Stratechery/Quora/HN/Reddit hybrid.

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pshin45
The state of the media industry (i.e. failure of Gigaom and the success of
Buzzfeed) seems to be a pretty strong counterexample to the oft-given advice
by YC and others that "It’s better to build something a small number of users
love than something a lot of users like"[1].

[1] [http://blog.samaltman.com/startup-advice-
briefly](http://blog.samaltman.com/startup-advice-briefly)

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guelo
Gigaom is a really boring news site. I read a lot of tech news and blogs and
never come across a link to Gigaom. Has the HN front page ever linked to a
Gigaom story?

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anuraj
Who reads these so called technical blogs - I neither find technology nor
entertainment in them.

