The Magazine Model
Tuesday, June 29th, 2004 by MR
After reading Jon Lesser’s weblog entry, The Business of Blogging,
and his “Four Primary Business Models Followed by Most Weblogs”, I wanted to discuss
my feelings regarding how the weblog medium is morphing into
something more than just a “daily-updated website”.
Weblog is a Dirty Word
Our company is named Business Logs, which is in part a way to move the thoughts of business executives away from associating “weblogs” with “personal ranty dialogs run by teenagers” — a stereotype that LiveJournal and others helped perpetuate — and into the mindset of a weblog being a viable communication medium they need to embrace. You probably won’t hire us to develop a weblog if you still feel as though “weblog” is a dirty word.
A Communicative Exchange
A weblog can be thought of as a two-way communication device, where authors
publish material, and readers give feedback. This is no different than
the human communication model of one person speaking, another listening,
and then the listener offering their feedback again to the speaker. This
cyclic communication model applies to various mediums, and a weblog is just
another version of it.
Traditional forms of media are one-way communication devices. Dan Rather
informs viewers about the news of the day, and millions of people sit back
on their couch and soak it all in. He doesn’t take your calls. He doesn’t check
his cellphone for SMS-messaged questions from a guy named John in Nebraska. He tells you what is on his teleprompter, and that’s the way it goes.
A magazine or newspaper is a slightly modified version of a one-way communication
exchange. Readers can voice their thoughts in the form of “Reader Mail” or on the
Editorial pages. However it may take weeks for your opinion to reach the newsstands,
so if it was related to time-sensitive information, tough luck. A magazine or newspaper
is not an instantaneously updated feedback device — it was never supposed to be.
A Twist on Traditional Media
Now people are taking the weblog medium to the next level by publishing magazines
online. This turns the traditional medium upside-down by introducing
a feedback mechanism which is a sure-fire way to work with your content on a whole different
level. Now you can publish your magazine articles a few times per week,
and interact with your readers at the same time. Jeffrey Zeldman et. al. were some of
the pioneers of this magazine-as-weblog format with A List Apart.
Now there is Boxes and Arrows and
Digital Web taking up the medium as well
just to name a few.
You can start a magazine too! Find a topic you know a lot about, find some writers
who are desperately seeking an outlet for their knowledge and creativity, put up a website
powered by the weblog software
of your
choice, and you’re done. Now fill it with content,
add some pages in there for your “editorial staff”, target your audience, and if the mix
is stirred just right you may have a hit website on your hands.
You can start out by using Google’s AdSense advertising to generate some revenue, and then
when you start pulling down a few dozen thousand uniques per month, you can move up to
some other type of advertising that is more lucrative. Split up your advertising revenue
amongst your writers (keeping more for yourself though, it was your idea!), pay for your
hosting, drop some money into web advertisements, send out press releases, tell your friends,
send out emails, comment on other weblogs, and guess what? You may actually be
profitable at some point soon.
Sounds too good to be true? Nope, it happens everyday.
Reader Comments
7 Responses to “The Magazine Model”
Define profitable. Do you mean you’ll make enough money to cover your costs of running the web sites and a little bit more on the side while you still work your “day job”. Or do you mean you actually you’ll make enough money to do this magazine full time with a decent salary to live off (at least $30,000/year). If you are talking of the latter, please tell me how you envision this or who is actually doing this (besides maybe someone like Andrew Sullivan). To reach that kind of profit would mean some pretty serious traffic (and with more traffic comes higher bandwidth costs).
June 29th, 2004 at 10:27 pm
Nollind, I meant the first one. Covering your hosting costs and making some money on the side is a good first step, but I wouldn’t bet the bank on your venture just yet. Keeping the day job until you can make enough money to support yourself and your family is always a good idea :)
June 30th, 2004 at 1:19 am
Ok, that’s what I thought but still your indicating that this is still somewhat of a feasible thing to do (I mean with regards to fully supporting yourself and your familiy). I’ve seen a lot of sites make enough money to pay their hosting bills with a smart chunk of change on the side but I’ve never heard of someone making enough money to support themselves (unless you count Andrew Sullivan and his huge tip jar that people seem to dump thousands in). In otherwords, I’m agreeing with you that you can make enough money to cover your bills, but if you want to do this as a full time business (and it would fully support you), it is next to impossible to achieve at this time, due to the current economic model on the Web. I’m not knocking the idea of doing it, I’m knocking the idea of trying to support yourself with it.
But I wish a different economic model would appear so that people could financially sustain themselves with it, assuming they had a great site and all. Paul, with his collection of excellent sites, would be a perfect candidate for this in my mind.
June 30th, 2004 at 12:35 pm
Good article indeed.
My experience says that the second one is as reachable as the first without needing to be Andrew Sullivan.
My set of main online magazines/independent news sites, on specific but complementary topics, pull in more than what you have described as a “decent salary to live off” and I think we are only looking at the beginning.
Bandwidth is not an issue. Ever. If you want to go somewhere you need some fuel. The issue, but there isn’t one, would only be the ratio of bandwidth cost to revenue. What I see is something like 1:40.
Google AdSense is the “perfect” mechanism to create and support such type of business as you have so clearly described.
Other ad providers or advertising agencies are not yet as capable, rich in inventory and skilled in doing this as AdSense is. Be careful.
If you can close an eye for their very bad interface Blogads is a good and very promising alternative. (http://www.blogads.com/)
The sites I have culled and maintain in this spirit are:
MasterNewMedia
http://www.masternewmedia.org/
MasterViews
http://www.masterviews.com/
Kolabora
http://www.Kolabora.com/
The present monthly average clickthrough ratio on these three sites ranges between 6.9% to 10%!
I think that the future is much rosier than it may look. But this can’t be a part-time blogger-kind-of-thing. This is serious, full-time, independent publishing.
We are on.
July 1st, 2004 at 6:36 pm
Interesting sites. Looks like you are primarily attracting people via aggregation of news but I noticed you do right your own content as well. I’m guessing your traffic is mainly attracted by your aggregated news (people keep coming back to see what’s new). I’m also assuming that most of your “salary” comes from Googles AdSense as well, even though you have multiple ad mechanisms on your site. BTW I totally agree with you, you can’t do this sort of thing on the side, it has to be your primary job.
Thanks for the links. You’ve peaked my interest. I’ll keep an eye on them.
BTW with regards to traffic, my background is in the computer gaming industry. Your site probably doesn’t have much worry with regards to bandwidth as it is mostly textual. The numerous gaming community sites that I saw fold due to lack of funding and support (via donations and ads) because they had huge bandwidth issues because they were very image intensive (lots of images showing off the various game aspects etc).
July 2nd, 2004 at 2:22 am
Hot Sauce is a great example of a “blogazine” - http://www.hotsaucelive.com
July 4th, 2004 at 4:05 pm
My site FastMachines is another example of a blog “magazine” focused on auto racing. I think that is another key part of this…you have to focus on something…the c|net’s and Yahoo!’s of the world will always have a little of everything….but what can you focus on and bring a special “flavor” to? That’s the question to ask yourself.
July 19th, 2004 at 8:13 pm
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