Seth Godin: Shoestring opportunity | Hacker News Reader

Seth Godin: Shoestring opportunity

sethgodin.typepad.com

10 pointsjcwentz10 comments

So the idea is that for every subject area, there is an opportunity for someone to aggregate news and blogs and make money off it.

I have to disagree with Seth this time. There are already plenty of people doing this, and the reason more aren't doing it is because the ones who are aren't making any money.

Look at row2k.com, the most popular news site for rowers. Ed Hewitt is spending like 18 hours a day on that site, but only because he loves the sport so much, because pretty much the only income they get is from donations. The ads seem to barely cover the server expenses.

For any given blog subject matter there is a blog carnival that aggregates the best posts each week, and none of those seem to be making any money either.

It makes sense. Think about it. If even the biggest news aggregators like Digg and Reddit, which aggregate all stories, can't make any money, then what are the chances that a news aggregator that collects only a tiny slice of stories will be hugely profitable. Especially since Seth is talking about setting up ads. It simply isn't realistic.

To be fair, rowing doesn't have the biggest audience in the world. Neither does technical news (a la Digg and Reddit).

Assuming you pick something hugely popular and you're the best (Godin suggests you'd also be the only) aggregator on the web, you're going to have some serious traffic. The presidential campaign videos has one such huge audience. Another might be following a professional sports league or tracking music videos within a genre.

Digg is in the top 100.

Unless you think your personal blog is going to be more popular than Wikipedia, it's just not going to happen.

Demographic data is what drives solid ad revenue. In this way, a niche site could actually generate better and more profitable advertising than one like Digg, which are less focused but have bigger numbers.

I'd agree with this is theory. But how many demographics really have a higher discretionary income than web-savvy rowers? The people-who-light-cigars-with-100-dollar-bills society? :-)

Touche.

That depends. Some observations, like this one: http://fortuito.us/2007/05/how_ads_really_work_superfans_1 suggest that a cadre of loyal regular fans don't bother clicking on ads at all. Instead it is the lost google user that is the real money maker.

It's an interesting counterpoint that would basically mean that the standard ad model may have issues the further down the long tail you go.

It would be interesting to see, and I don't have any data to corroborate this, if the "membership" model shares an inverse relationship to the ad model as you move into smaller and smaller niches.

I'm skeptical.

This sounds more like a request to the Lazyweb -- http://lazyweb.org/ -- because it's something he'd like to use, rather than a business opportunity.

If he really thought it was the latter, he would probably just go ahead and do it himself.

We'll he's basically doing this with http://www.squidoo.com/ right?

Although that site seems so spammy to me - I can't believe it's #628 on Alexa.

Those are called blogs, no?

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