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/...
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.
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.
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...
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.
Indeed, the article mentions they were paying for office space in both Manhattan and San Francisco.
On a basic level, advertisers are looking for reach and frequency for their ads.
These two requirements are nearly impossible for a high level content publisher to achieve on the internet, where good reach means 10 million readers plus and good frequency means over 50 million page views from that audience. I'm sorry but not that many people are looking for enterprise tech stories, which were Gigaom's forte
Factoring for VC expectations, and you're looking at much larger traffic requirements to satisfy business targets.
High level content has to either: 1. Operate as a small ad business online, no VC 2. Operate in other medium such as magazines, where smaller reach would be appreciated by advertisers
I think they tried to expand rapidly into new business models and lost all the money and then some. I don't think it was because they weren't getting enough money from ads to sustain the news business, or at least I haven't seen anyone seriously put forward that theory so far (from the company).
Their opex was incredible. Look at salaries alone just what was mentioned in the article, somewhere around 4 dozen people? That's less than $200K/yr salary per person don't forget they had a website and office space and misc expenses and presumably the employees had benefits (per my W-2 form my families health insurance cost my employer $24K last year, and there's only 4 of us).
There is a simple math problem that explains the problem. Eight million per year in opex divided by six million visitors a month means somewhere around ten cents per page view cost. If you get more than a buck or so worth of ad revenue or "whatever" per page view you win. If you get five cents of ad revenue or "whatever" per page view you rapidly run out of money and close. The number of sites that get a buck of revenue per page view is pretty small. The other strategy is yellow journalism "click here for 10 things you never knew about hacker news" and hope for 60 million page views instead of 6.
According to the editor-in-chief of Dr. Dobb's, there's been a recent, structural shift.
Sure it is -- but if you are selling eyeballs, then the content is king is content that is geared to get eyeballs and get the maximum number of ad views out of them.
If you are selling content to those consuming it directly, then the utility of the content to the consumer is the key thing -- but that's different than the advertising-supported model.
They are the buzzfeed of another market. It seems pretty clear that if you want to go big, you need to compromise on the quality.
"Why" is left as an exercise to the readers.