Blogs Are Eating Tech Media Alive

Heinz writes with an article in Forbes on how advertising in tech media is drying up and going — where else? — into specialist blogs and Google. "Silicon Valley is booming again. But if you work in tech media, there's blood on the floor. Take Red Herring. It hung onto its offices after getting the eviction notice earlier this month. But gossip site Valleywag is breaking story after story not just on its beat — but about its woes. Meanwhile, bigger publications are hurting too: Time Warner's Business 2.0 saw ad pages drop 21.8% through March from the same period a year ago; PC Magazine's editor in chief walked out the door after ad pages fell 38.8% over the same period; and one-time online powerhouse CNET is reporting growing losses even as the companies it covers flourish. It may be happening in tech first, but there's no reason the same thing won't happen, eventually, in every media niche."

"Upside" went bust, too.

[Animats]

A few years ago, Upside magazine went bust. Since I own Downside [downside.com], I looked into buying their domain, but the assets of Upside were eventually acquired by another tech publishing firm. The article didn't mention Upside, although they mentioned The Industry Standard and Business 2.0, which also tanked.

We also lost Silicon Valley's newspaper, the San Jose Mercury News. It's been purchased by an outfit that runs cheesy suburban throwaways, and is being brought down to that level. It's still published, but nobody cares.

And Murdoch is buying the Wall Street Journal. Soon, there will be very few information sources that actually go out and dig out news.

Re:They waste money on editors

[BillyBlaze]

Multiple pages are annoying, yes, but the biggest problem is the lack of links. When talking about technology, there's usually a relevant web site. Blogs will link to it, maybe adding some commentary of their own. But most journalism is written with the intent that you'll learn everything you want to know from the article itself, or other articles from the same source. Unfortunately I'm not sitting on a bench in the park in 1960 reading a newspaper, I'm on the internet, and if your site won't link to more information about the subject at hand, I'll go somewhere that will. And I don't just mean links to related stories - I want links to other sites. I know it's scary, but don't worry, if your story is interesting, I'll open it in another tab, and I'll continue ignoring your ads when I close it.

A real tech magazine

[slashbart]

Circuit Cellar [circuitcellar.com] is doing fine, and has been doing fine for decades. It's the low to zero information content magazines that'll go away. Well, good riddance.

The funny thing is that its founder Steve Ciarcia [wikipedia.org] left then market leader Byte Magazine, because it was turning into an advertorial marketing rag. Guess which magazine no longer exists :-)

Re:This won't decrease the amount of advertising

[jlarocco]

Unfortunately, short of turning off Javascript (which I once advocated but today you really can't use even the most basic of sites without it), AdWords seem nearly unblockable. Sometimes the "printable" form of the page gives some relief, but even then you often get every other paragraph interlaced with a half-printed-page banner.

Block "*googlesyndication.com*" and "*google-analytics.com*" to get rid of 99% of AdWord ads.

Re:Bullshit

[BiggerIsBetter]

Slashdot is really a glorified blog. It aggregates news sources from all over, stories that its members think are interesting. But without the original sources that generate these stories -- media outlets who pay writers to produce stories -- outlets like Slashdot disappear.

No, Slashdot is a glorified discussion forum. The discussion topics (news) is user submitted (albiet with editor assistance) and user moderated - it's not some random cat on the net spouting off about whatever and pining for attention, it's a large audience of participants interacting with each other. As long as the topics are relevant to the geek audience, I don't think it would much matter where they come from... indeed many links have been to purely amateur sources and projects as opposed to professional media.

Re:They waste money on editors

[dada21]

So what is the answer? Community-supported forums won't last due to the high bandwidth and processor cost of running a forum. I know, I host and maintain somewhere in the neighborhood of 6 dozen forums (all ad supported) and the hosting costs can be a nightmare. We did co-lo for a while, but that was a bigger mess, so now we're with NFSN.

1. Advertising keeps them in business because of the bell curve -- some people block ads, some people overclick ads (causing them to pay zero), but the middle ground is usually enough to keep a site alive. My oldest website still earns somewhere in the realm of $200 a month through ads and it hasn't been updated in 2 years -- but people still get there through Google and the information on the site is still "good enough" because it has to do with old hardware. That income offsets my new sites. According to my records, only 12% of my visitors block ads, which isn't a big deal. But as ad-blocking grows, we've had to resort to new income streams such as "advertiser funded posts" (ReviewMe.com for example), which I absolutely hate.

2. That is the worst. We tried it and canned it on most sites because it ruins the flow of the content. On a few private newsletter sites, we've gotten rid of advertising entirely except on the home page and moved to a subscriber-oriented system. But most people aren't interested in paying $20 a year for daily updates, so we had to balance it -- subscribers get news/updates early (like slashdot, but a day or two in advance) and registered users get it later. Unregistered users don't get anything but a homepage. It seems to work, and we've actually paid our writers a bit more this year than last, but I doubt it will last.

3. This is SO TRUE. On one of my newsletters (regarding Mobile Home ownership and investments, which is now the new spam-topic, ugh) we actually spend a great deal of time looking for more depth to the usual content. Most of the websites (spamsites) that cover this topic are loaded with old and antiquated information, but they can rank much higher in Google, causing the entire market to suffer. I think I spend as much time working on Google ranking as on content -- the more visitors we get, the more income we get, allowing us to spend more writing content. Rinse and repeat.

4. I'd love to see some sort of Web 3.0 ability to drag and drop CONTENT from a website into my own "newspaper format" site. I do it, sort of, through RSS, but it doesn't always display correctly. Some sites toss advertising into their RSS, which really throws things off if it has any formatting needs (in RSS, yeesh). One thing we're working strongly on this year is developing format-free sites for mobile applications. They're low bandwidth (tiny server costs), late latency (tiny server load) and they build your market for non-mobile readers.

5. Horrid. But then again, have you seen the language and grammar skills coming out of COLLEGES lately? I had to tell a new writer the difference between their and they're abut 60 times in a month. And this person had a journalism degree from a decent college. Unbelievable.

Since I'm pro-market, though, I know it will all work out. The MSM has been subsidized and protected by the State for far too long, and it's a good thing that information is falling in cost because of the supply of people willing to write. Hopefully some sort of "digg-like" article ranking system will start up that will let people moderate blogs and articles and forums, and also allow people to meta-moderate those moderations to keep people in check.