With more and more mainstream outlets launching blogs and taking down the paywalls around their news, what’s a blogger to do?
As this trend accelerates, and these sites get wise to the traffic and revenue generating potential of service journalism (which is all a blog like Engadget really is, anyway) there is a very real potential that they will start to climb the search engine ranks and siphon off some of the traffic that the small fry have been relying on for their revenue.
Here’s a quick survey of the changing competitive landscape:
Recently Made Their Content Free:
- The Economist
- CNN.com’s Pipeline video-news service
Will make their content free:
- New York Times
- Wall Street Journal
And here’s what you can do to fight back:
1. Write an ebook
If the big boys are moving to free, why not outflank them by charging for your content? It might sound crazy, but a well-written ebook has a lot of potential utility for a reader:
- unique content — often a ‘how-to’
- a perceived value proportional to effort put in
- has specific utility – e.g. Take Control Books
- the psychological notion that, as a .pdf, an ebook has some physicality – some tie to our old notion of books
2. Make sure your niche is unique — or too small to be of value to a larger company
Sometimes blogs feel like the 10,000 different industry newsletters that we never knew we needed to be reading. As readership fragments and people become more comfortable building their own diet of news via RSS readers, Google homepages and sheer habit, niches will continue to proliferate. Large media companies simply don’t have the desire or resources to pursue them all.
3. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em
Don’t think of it as the last refuge of the coward — rather, it’s a recognition that the coming years will see a lot of consolidation in the blogosphere. In fact, it’s already happening, as recently-flipped videoblog WallStrip illustrates. If you’re already building a strong brand through your domain, don’t be surprised if a blog network or other mainstream outlet comes knocking. Or you could always be proactive and offer your services to them directly.
