Magazines and Newspapers
The business of Salon , http://www.salon.com, is to provide informed editorial content. This business is profitable because of the
advertising that appears on the Salon site. The business model of Salon, and other online magazines , is pretty much like that of a
brick-and-mortar newspaper or magazine: subsidize the distribution of your articles and editorials, and make your revenue with
sponsored ads. This works pretty well on the Web, even though it is essentially old-fashioned.
Although it is harder to get subscription revenue for content on the Web than off-Web, profit margins for online advertising are higher,
and ads can be more reliably targeted to the context of the content. (This last point is important, because it is the unique selling
proposition for web advertising as opposed to advertising in other mediums.)
Opinions differ at even the most successful online venues whether charging a subscription fee for access to content makes sense, or not.
(This is a debate that is almost as old as the Web, and yet to be fully resolved.)
For example, the Wall Street Journal does, but the New York Times does not charge for most access. The New York Times online site has
a far greater revenue base from online advertising and certain pay-for-access premium services than the Wall Street Journal with its
entirely subscription-based model. Probably either model can work. But at this point, the advertising model seems to be winning the
race.
You probably read one or more blogs , at least from time to time. A blog, also called a weblog or web log, is a diary of entries, usually
presented on the Web in reverse chronological order. You may even write your own blog. The subject matter of blogs varies wildly, from
general rants and raves, to blogs about relationships, to blogs more-or-less devoted to specific technologies, such as my Googleplex
Blog (when I don't get too carried away with tangents, my blog is about Google's technology, searching, and research on the Web).
If you think that blogs about a specific subject are an ideal (although narrow) venue for targeted advertising content, you are quite right.
Unlike opinion sites that are basically online magazines, blogs are a specifically web phenomenon (sometimes collectively referred to as
the blogosphere ). A variety of software mechanismssuch as the ability to automatically collect trackback links in a blog entry, meaning
links to sites or blogs that discuss the original entrymake blogging an extremely effective and versatile mechanism for publishing content
on the Web. Syndication built into most blog content management software such as MovableType or WordPress allows easy
distribution of the content.
All is not perfect in paradise, though, and there are some problems with blogging as a vehicle for making money from your content. First,
there are so many blogs. It's easy to create a blog using hosted services such as Google's Blogger or Six Apart Software 's community
sites TypePad and LiveJournal. (Six Apart is the publisher of MovableType blogging software.)
But it's hard to stand out from the mass of blogs and generate notice and traffic. See Chapter 2 for some ideas about how to drive traffic to a blog and Chapter 10 for information about how to purchase traffic for a blog using Google's AdWords contextual advertising program.
Next, the fact that blogs are essentially unvetted and unedited makes some advertisers leery about placing ads on these sites. If you do
expect to make money from advertising on your blog, it's a good idea to be careful with spelling, punctuation, and the overall
presentation issues involved with writing.
Finally, most bloggers use hosted blogging services such as Blogger, so they don't have to worry about configuring or maintaining their
own blogging software. Installing software like MovableType is tricky enough that Six Apart, the company that wrote the software, will get
it going for you on your own web serverfor a fee.
But the problem with having a hosted blog is that generally it's not up to you to place advertising on it. If there is contextual advertising,
the revenue may go to the blog host. So if you plan to make money from blogging content, you need to either set up your own blogging
server software or work with a specialized web hosting organization that handles the technical end of things but still lets you profit from
advertising.
The problem of losing control of the revenue potential of hosted sites can be presented in contexts
other than blogging. For example, many smaller e-commerce web sites outsource order
processing and shopping cart functionality. This often makes practical sense, but may mean that
these pages are no longer available for advertisingor that the advertising and profits are controlled
by the host rather than you.
1.1.5. Practical Information: Content Sites and Niches
The O'Reilly site (http://www.oreilly.com) provides a great deal of practical information, such as code from the O'Reilly books. O'Reilly is
also a source of (usually) well-informed opinions, mostly about topics related to technology: for example, the O'Reilly author blogs,
articles, and other quality content.
Many people turn to the Web as their first line of approach for finding information: about technology, relationships, travel destinations,
and much more. These content niches are probably the most dependable road to advertising riches on the Web.
Niches don't necessarily have to be big niches. For example, my site Mechanista , http://www.mechanista.com, features antique
machinery such as typewriters and adding machines. Mechanista makes slow but steady AdSense revenue (from companies selling
things like typewriter ribbons).
Don't forget the old saw that it's better to be a big fish in a small pond than a small fish in a big pond. Sites that feature a niche that is of
interest only to a small group of people (but very interesting to those people) are likely to achieve high search engine rankings for the
relevant terms, draw traffic through the search engines, and become well known among aficionados of the niche.
If you are the publisher of this kind of niche site, you may not get rich off contextual advertising (you simply cannot draw the eyeballs
necessary for getting rich), but you are likely to make a nice revenue return in relation to the effort involved.
Magazines&Blogosphere and much!!
