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The general formula is you have to nurture and build your own community. Quality over quantity. There are many examples of people aggregating and filtering cont
by wallflower 12y ago
The general formula is you have to nurture and build your own community. Quality over quantity. There are many examples of people aggregating and filtering content (http://iosdevweekly.com http://iosdevweekly.com) to producing content (basically all sites from the smallest blog up to BuzzFeed). The metric if there is one is how engaged your community is. Do they open your regular cadence newsletter? Do your current readers forward your newsletters? You can game social media all you want and in the end the real thing is are you providing value to people in the community you are contributing to/part of. All those people who sell 2,000 books with a single email spent hundreds of hours growing their email list one by one. It is easy to write one blog post that goes viral. And to get them to come back and read what your write next - that is harder.
Grow your community, give back, deliver something unique that you can provide on a regular basis.
The reality is you don't own anything if you work for a company. But if you have 100 or 1000 mailing list opens - that is all yours.
The rhetorical question is do you want to make $12,000 a year or $120k/year. The catch hear is $120k is salaried and NOT geometrically scalable while the $12k refers to your own sales/ad revenue. That what you own and have built is scalable.
It is all about influence and/or providing what people want.
- xyby 12y agoHow is iosdevweekly monetized?
- thenomad 12y agoInteresting. I've run a somewhat successful aggregation website in the past, and found that I hit significant scaling problems. Can you provide a few more examples of aggregation / filtering services that have achieved reasonably high profitability? Always interesting to see what other people do that I don't!
- wallflower 12y agoCongratulations! I'd be curious about the scaling problems. I assume you were trying to source the content from the community? In general, the aggregation / filtering services that I like have that more as a feature of their site rather than being its sole focus. That means, aggregation / filtering is definitely done with a more human touch, editorial bent. This one is owned by the Chronicle of Higher Education and is not necessarily about profits. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arts_%26_Letters_Daily http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arts_%26_Letters_Daily And, we cannot forget the grand-daddy of all tech aggregation sites. http://techmeme.com http://techmeme.com And where would the Internet be with 'X and you won't believe what happened next' and 'N things you should now about Y'. BuzzFeed has an 'area' full of people (not 'room' because it is Open Plan) who actively look for content that is going viral/could go viral. To their credit, they are using their top-10 (Comscore) ranking and going after more serious journalism.
- andyidsinga 12y agoI'm going to take the other side and say ...quantity over quality as long as two conditions are met a) fun to make (by the op ) and 2) useful to someone ( op at a minimum ) keep a close eye on what sticks and then iterate and polish. also ...maybe structure your mini-products under companies in such a way that if an acquirer came along you could sell it for a decent chunk of change.