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The biggest problem with many of the "alternatives" is that they don't really work. They only really work for lone cowboys who only have themselves to feed. 1.

The biggest problem with many of the "alternatives" is that they don't really work. They only really work for lone cowboys who only have themselves to feed. 1.) Recommendations don't work at scale. You are not going to find a single company to fund gaming journalism company in order to do tighter recommendations, and you aren't going to have enough man power to manage recommendations for multiple companies. Amazingly enough, there is a company called Google that provides a similar service to this, and I doubt destructoid can compete with them. 2.) Selling T-shirts is a terrible business model for a company that doesn't produce t-shirts. Again this works for the lone-cowboy, but for an actual company expecting to recuperate costs with t-shirts it would be simpler to just open a clothing line. Producing t-shirts isn't free and you once you have a sizable market its no longer easy. Now instead of hiring writers, you find yourself hiring sweatshops. 3.) Selling physical books only works for the lone cowboys (smbc, oatmeal). If you have to do it at scale, it would be smarter to just open a bookstore. And again, why should anyone buy an ebook when they could just use Readability for free? 4.) Charing for your service. This makes the most sense, NYT does it and is really successful. Problem is, it might only work for NYT. Its hard to convince gamers who in a large part don't buy their games, to pay for your service. Out of all the sites you ad-block, how many of them would you actually pay for? If Kotaku required a subscription for their service, would you actually pay for it? Its easy to be an armchair MBA and claim ads are the problem and anything else would work without having tried it yourself, or list companies who are doing so successfully. Its just completely unfair to assume that the guys actually busting their butts trying to make it work are lazy because they use ads. If you really think these alternate models really work, you should start your company with them. With no competitors you are certain to eat the market. Until then, please understand that online journalism, and print media in general, is really hurting to find a business model that actually works and they aren't using ads out of laziness. They are using ads to pay the bills.

InclinedPlane 14y ago
2) T-shirts are a great business model, there's a reason why so many web comics do it. They provide a healthy profit margin at comparatively low overhead. For a reasonably popular site t-shirt revenue can be as much or more than advertising revenue. I'll point to Topatoco as an example here, it's a company that provides fulfillment for t-shirts and similar merch for 3rd party content creators, and is successful enough that it services several dozen such creators. Given that they manage to employ something like a dozen staff (including part-time employees) and they operate on a lower commission than many other similar services I think that's a good indicator of how successful that business model can be for the creators. 3) See #2. As for why anyone would buy a book, because a book is compiled and easier to read. Whether or not you think it's reasonable the market certainly does. 37 Signals book "Rework" is a bestseller and one of the top selling books in the entrepreneurship category. Look at the popularity of the Joel on Software books as well. As for your final point, I disagree. Online journalism is still following the, now obsolete, model of traditional journalism. One concentrated on access, aggregation, and conduits rather than original content. Most journalism is, frankly, trash. It's regurgitation. Find one article on a news story and I can point you to hundreds of copies of the same material with no significant value added, splattered across so many "news" sites. Aggregation of that sort is no longer significantly valuable in the internet age. And sites that don't offer significant added original value are going to die. The internet is very, very good at disintermediating valueless intermediaries.

InclinedPlane 14y ago

2) T-shirts are a great business model, there's a reason why so many web comics do it. They provide a healthy profit margin at comparatively low overhead. For a reasonably popular site t-shirt revenue can be as much or more than advertising revenue. I'll point to Topatoco as an example here, it's a company that provides fulfillment for t-shirts and similar merch for 3rd party content creators, and is successful enough that it services several dozen such creators. Given that they manage to employ something like a dozen staff (including part-time employees) and they operate on a lower commission than many other similar services I think that's a good indicator of how successful that business model can be for the creators. 3) See #2. As for why anyone would buy a book, because a book is compiled and easier to read. Whether or not you think it's reasonable the market certainly does. 37 Signals book "Rework" is a bestseller and one of the top selling books in the entrepreneurship category. Look at the popularity of the Joel on Software books as well. As for your final point, I disagree. Online journalism is still following the, now obsolete, model of traditional journalism. One concentrated on access, aggregation, and conduits rather than original content. Most journalism is, frankly, trash. It's regurgitation. Find one article on a news story and I can point you to hundreds of copies of the same material with no significant value added, splattered across so many "news" sites. Aggregation of that sort is no longer significantly valuable in the internet age. And sites that don't offer significant added original value are going to die. The internet is very, very good at disintermediating valueless intermediaries.