I love publisher success stories. I think it’s part of the core of what I love about the business aspects of the web, and why I ended up building advertising tools that help them earn more money doing what they love.
The New York Times recently published an article about Arnold Kim who runs MacRumors.com, one of the most successful blogs on the web.
It’s not really a touching rags to riches story as Kim was already earning a six-figure income as a doctor, but it is a great example how identifying a need, then building a relatively simple site, and working really hard to create great content over the years can put you in a great place.
The site placed MacRumors No. 2 on a list of the “25 most valuable blogs,” right behind Gawker Media and ahead of The Huffington Post, PerezHilton.com, and TechCrunch. Two of the other tech-oriented blogs on its list, Ars Technica and PaidContent, were sold earlier this year, reportedly for sums in excess of $25 million.
The cynics out there will say “Sure, but all the good topics already have established sites today so it’s too hard to compete.” While it’s true it’d be hard to crack the rumor market for Apple right now, it’s far from true in general. There are new areas of interest all the time that lend themselves to opportunities. Techcrunch is one of the most successful sites out there, and it was started a couple of years ago when Web 2.0 caught fire.
Just now the market is somewhat open for someone to do a great job covering the iPhone App world in great detail and becoming THE resource. An established site like MacRumors.com has an advantage of already having a foothold in this area, but they also suffer from not being able to focus on the topic exclusively.
It’s not that hard to think up topics if you open your mind, the harder part is putting in the effort for years creating content and marketing your site to achieve the success. It’s exciting to know though that the door is still wide open, and I think we’ll be reading stories like this for years to come.
July 20th, 2008
Over the last year as I’ve used a Blackberry at work and iPhone for personal use I realized I mostly do my RSS feed reading on my phones now while traveling. What this has primarily done, is taught me that the mobile web is going to become increasingly important in the future. I know, that wasn’t really that unique of a revelation. Perhaps a minor but more actionable revelation is that summary only RSS feeds just suck. They really do.
When I used to read feeds on my computer with a fast broadband connection it was nice to be able to scroll through 20 summaries quickly in my feed reader and then click through for the whole article if it seemed worthwhile. However, when reading on a mobile phone with a slower connection, I hate having to click through and wait for a page to load, then come back to the feed reader when finished. It makes the process much slower.
The arguments for summaries are that it makes people come visit your website where you can make money from ads, get the visitors for your web analytics, protect people from stealing your full content, and hit people with links to more content. The thing is, you can do that within your feeds in different ways. There are a few different RSS advertising providers like Yahoo Publisher Network, Feedburner, Text Link Ads Feedvertising, or Pheedo. There are also plugins to let you sell ads in your feed yourself.
Additionally, there are ways you can put links to your prominent content in your feeds, and you can also use feed analytics from Feedburner or others to track the visitors and usage. As for protecting your content, John Chow and others are putting notices in their feeds with links to their sites if it shows up on other sites.
I think people who use summary-only feeds are going to dramatically lose readership as people move to more feed reading over mobile devices. Just a warning….
September 6th, 2007
I love publisher success stories like this one in Fast Company about WhateverLife.com. Reading about how people succeed online always gets me excited about what is possible through the web, and how anyone with some hard work, basic skills, and a little luck can create a very successful online business.
While WhateverLife.com is definitely not my cup of tea, it’s an impressive story of a high school student with some basic HTML skill building a web business many would really enjoy owning.
I think there are three basic lessons that can be gathered from the long article and applied to any web ventures:
- It doesn’t matter who or where you are. You can be a high school student in Detroit with no business or web experience and build a successful business. On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. In some ways, having a ton of work and business experience can be a hindrance because you become trained to see why things WON’T work instead of driving to just achieve your goals.
- Build your site around something you’re passionate about. Ashley didn’t start her site with the plans to make it a huge business, she started it because she found something she was interested in and just wanted to help. That passion for your topic is extremely important.
- It helps to be your demographic. Even though I’m much more experienced on the web and in the web business world, Ashley would do a better job of building WhateverLife.com then I would because she is the target audience. Just like Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook, there’s a huge advantage to being the audience you are targeting. You understand their needs, their wants, what they’re thinking, and what they do and don’t think is cool. I’d have a hard time relating to the audience of high school girls.
Hopefully Ashley made good decisions passing on her buyout offers and continues to build WhateverLife.com.
August 22nd, 2007
I’ve got a proposal in the panel picker for SXSW 2008 called “Maximizing Ad Revenue for Online Publishers“. The title explains it pretty well, but if it’s voted in as one of the panels at the conference I’ll put together a panel of industry experts to go over the core methods today that publishers can maximize their ad revenue.
I think it will be educational, great for beginners, but also provide some nuggets of wisdom that even experts will benefit from.
If you’re interested in this panel idea, please go vote for it by giving it a star rating. Note: You do need to sign up for a free account to register, they promise to not spam you.
August 21st, 2007
Over the last week some surprising publishers have been snapped up by larger companies for what appears to be some monetary victories for the publishers. I’m not sure why it’s surprising, beyond the fact that I don’t think there were many rumors about these companies, and it’s an eclectic mix that seems to point towards a general trend in a particular hot industry.
Here’s the deals announced over the past week:
Discovery buys Treehugger for $10 million – A single blog that grew into a community with forums and more, but $10 million seems pretty solid for a blog in a specific industry. Although it is a very important and growing industry.
Disney buys Club Penguin for $350 Million or More? – This one looks really bizarre if you had no background on Club Penguin. However, it’s an insanely popular site with kids. One has to wonder though, how long will penguins be the cool virtual pet for kids? Apparently there are earnouts in this deal to the tune of another $350 million. Without really doing much analysis, it feels like Club Penguin’s founders are sitting back laughing they sold a site about being a penguin for at least $350 million.
Handheld Buys Ebaum’s World for $15 million or More? – Another deal that has more earnouts with performance goals. Ebaum’s has been around forever, so you’d wonder why they’d be selling now? And are they kicking themselves they could have been YouTube but just missed out on a few basic things?
Rumor: Sparkpeople to sell for $75 Million – Doesn’t look like this one is confirmed yet, but I’d never heard of Sparkpeople. Apparently it’s the third-largest dieting site. Good for them.
Then we also have publisher success like Markus Frind of PlentyofFish who has long been a proponent of growing independently and not building out a huge business. He’s either announcing he’s for sale as well now, or is really serious about going from a one-man operation to a full-fledged company with employees and a sales team.
What does this recent activity mean? Are we in a bubble where publishers are taking advantage and selling for a crazy premium? To some it seems that way, but in other ways you wonder what would happen if the publishers continued to hold out and grow their business even more. Some of the publishers who sold out back in the early part of this decade would be worth far more today had the stayed independent. At the same time, I think it’s never black and white and in many cases depends on the particular situation each publisher finds themselves in. Can they grow more on their own? Are there more advantages that a bigger parent company can provide to further their mission?
Unfortunately I don’t have the answers, but I think it’s a great time to be a successful web publisher. You can potentially find a solid offer for your business if you wish to be acquired, or you can keep on growing and building. It’s still a very young industry.
August 4th, 2007
Making money through blogging is not a new concept. However, a recent set of blog posts and articles I’ve come across in the last couple of weeks taken together could make one think that if you want to make a living through the web that blogging is the best way to go.
First I ran across the Wired article about Mike Arrington and his success with TechCrunch, then it was Ken Savage and his Diabetes blog that makes $40k/year, and yesterday John Chow announced his blog income for June to the tune of over $12,000 in one month. Of course there are also some longtime bloggers like Darren Rowse at ProBlogger.net who actually specialize in helping people blog better and make more money doing it, while also talking about his own success of “six figure blogging”.
All of those are some impressive stories and I’m happy for all of them. They are not doing anything wrong by promoting their abilities in knowledge in helping people earn more money from blogging. Their stories are true, and they show that it is possible to make good money from blogging.
However, if you’re starting today, blogging is NOT the choice I’d recommend for people to make a living online. First, let’s look at why it’s such a popular choice right now.
Why is blogging popular for trying to make money?
1. Articles and blog posts like those mentioned above make blogs the “top of mind” choice because they are the hot topic as one of the newer and hipper publishing models for making money.
2. Blogs are receiving a lot of press and notoriety for their role in breaking news and changing the media landscape. This leads to the natural inclination for many people to want to join in on the “revolution”.
3. Social networks and other types of social media are getting people used to the concept of personal publishing and blogging before they jump in and do it, so blogging might be the most familiar publishing model to them.
4. Setting up a blog is easier than setting up an in-depth content site, affiliate site, ecommerce site, web application, or other venture on the web. It has a very low technology barrier to entry.
5. Blogging is more of an ego boost than other publishing types because they often are known as individuals instead of a company. Those who want attention are more likely to blog than to start an ecommerce site.
All these things make blogging a very popular choice right now, which is one of the reasons why breaking your blog out of the clutter to actually make significant income from it is so difficult today.
Why else is blogging not a great choice?
1. The low barrier of technology involved means almost anyone with a little skill can start a blog, and anyone with a little technical skill can make a unique blog. This is why there are millions of blogs today and almost every imaginable topic is currently being covered.
2. Since the vast majority of blogs are the same in format and technology, in order to succeed you need to be an amazing writer, a prolific creator of content, well-connected, a first-mover in a topic, be able to break news, or just get lucky. Some combination of those traits is required to get your blog traffic and links, and even then it’s no guarantee you’ll be able to monetize your blog well. Because….
3. Even popular blogs don’t necessarily generate a huge amount of ad inventory. In comparison to topical community sites, web applications, and social networks, blogs just don’t create a lot of ad impressions. It’s party due to the format of most blogs having a front page with all the recent content all on one page, and partly because even popular blogs with loud voices get a small amount of traffic compared to sites that hit the mainstream world.
4. Yes, there are other ways of making money from a blog besides advertising. There are donations (requires a big audience willing to give), ecommerce/affiliate (if you’re going to do this, is a blog the best way?), and blogging can lead to other opportunities like consulting or getting a job offer.
5. Even the most successful blogs pale in comparison in revenue and profit generated compared to top content sites, affiliate sites, ecommerce sites, and web applications. The top few revenue producing blogs I’ve heard of are in the 100-200k per month in revenue. That’s impressive, but not when you consider there’s thousands of no name affiliates, content site producers, and small ecommerce site operators doing the same amount of revenue and much better.
What should you do then?
If I’ve convinced you that blogging alone isn’t the way to make a living online, then you’re probably asking what you should do. The bad news is that the following suggestions all take more work than just signing up at Wordpress.com and talking about your favorite topic all day. The good news is that the opportunities today online are still very big, but you have to go a little above and beyond the average blogger to make it work.
1. Pick a topic you’re passionate about. It’s much easier to put in time and effort about a topic that you really are interested in. Preferably, this area of interest also has advertisers, products or services to sell or refer, and content that can be created around it.
2. Evaluate what the best opportunity in that area is between creating a content/community site, becoming an affiliate in that space, or starting an ecommerce site. There are lots of great articles and sites around the web that teach you how to build sites of these types.
3. Learn how to outsource. Don’t try and learn how to be a designer, programmer, marketer, and all that on your own. Unless you’re really talented, it’s more likely that there are others who can do the work better than you and for cheaper than your own time is worth. Sites like elance.com, scriptlance.com, and specific forums in these areas are great resources to find people who are willing to do this work for you for a fee. Sure, it takes a little startup money, but not that much. If you’re serious about making money online, you’ll have to be willing to spend a few thousand dollars to get it going right. In the history of starting businesses, this is probably the cheapest opportunity ever.
4. At least master the basics of SEO (search engine optimization) and PPC (Pay Per Click) marketing. Both of these techniques are the top ways to get people to your site. Every website is dead in the water without good search engine optimization and/or the ability to drive traffic profitably through pay per click marketing. Simply by mastering PPC alone you can be an affiliate and find ways to buy traffic cheaply and send it to a simple affiliate landing page where you make more money than you spent.
5. Learn, learn, learn. The great thing about the web is that new technologies and techniques of doing business online are coming out daily. What worked two years ago doesn’t necessarily work today. If you focus on learning the new opportunities as they present themselves, it won’t matter much that you didn’t get started years ago.
Good luck.
July 9th, 2007
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