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And on to of that, Gigaom tried the shift away from ads to subscriptions: Instead, we opted to take the road less traveled — subscription revenues. [1] Which

And on to of that, Gigaom tried the shift away from ads to subscriptions: Instead, we opted to take the road less traveled — subscription revenues. [1] Which still did not bring in enough revenue. [1] https://gigaom.com/2014/02/20/now-that-gigaom-is-all-grown-up-its-time-for-the-next-chapter/ https://gigaom.com/2014/02/20/now-that-gigaom-is-all-grown-u...

ilamont 12y ago
I had no idea their headcount was 70. It would be hard to maintain such a large staff unless research + events + advertising + other were doing really, really well.
Steko 12y ago
It's not advertising that's the problem as many in the comments seem to think; it's the shitty type of ads these 90s websites were all built around. The recent Marissa Mayer piece in Medium [1] made much of the fact that her big accomplishment so far was transitioning from the old dying Banner ads model to a mobile/video/social/fake content friendly model. Also consider this bit from buzzfeed [2] which I first saw from stratechery's great article [3] on them. The banner ad, whose decline Farhad Manjoo recently celebrated, was also born during this era and created a business model in which clicks are tied directly to dollars — something many people assume is still how all online publishers make their money. But BuzzFeed has never sold a banner, and I couldn't even tell you how many monthly page views we get. And so our business model at least moderates that incentive to drag every last click out of our audience. [1] https://medium.com/backchannel/marissa-mayer-has-completed-step-one-71dc31912855 https://medium.com/backchannel/marissa-mayer-has-completed-s... [2] http://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/why-buzzfeed-doesnt-do-clickbait#.giGNn3djZ http://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/why-buzzfeed-doesnt-do-clic... [3] http://stratechery.com/2015/buzzfeed-important-news-organization-world/ http://stratechery.com/2015/buzzfeed-important-news-organiza...

ilamont 12y ago

I had no idea their headcount was 70. It would be hard to maintain such a large staff unless research + events + advertising + other were doing really, really well.

Steko 12y ago

It's not advertising that's the problem as many in the comments seem to think; it's the shitty type of ads these 90s websites were all built around. The recent Marissa Mayer piece in Medium [1] made much of the fact that her big accomplishment so far was transitioning from the old dying Banner ads model to a mobile/video/social/fake content friendly model. Also consider this bit from buzzfeed [2] which I first saw from stratechery's great article [3] on them. The banner ad, whose decline Farhad Manjoo recently celebrated, was also born during this era and created a business model in which clicks are tied directly to dollars — something many people assume is still how all online publishers make their money. But BuzzFeed has never sold a banner, and I couldn't even tell you how many monthly page views we get. And so our business model at least moderates that incentive to drag every last click out of our audience. [1] https://medium.com/backchannel/marissa-mayer-has-completed-step-one-71dc31912855 https://medium.com/backchannel/marissa-mayer-has-completed-s... [2] http://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/why-buzzfeed-doesnt-do-clickbait#.giGNn3djZ http://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/why-buzzfeed-doesnt-do-clic... [3] http://stratechery.com/2015/buzzfeed-important-news-organization-world/ http://stratechery.com/2015/buzzfeed-important-news-organiza...