The Death of Niche Blogging?
For years, bloggers have been indoctrinated into the concept of niche blogging. The idea was to focus on a small segment (people who love to watch cute kittens, for instance) and watch advertisers beat down your door to sell to a narrowly-defined market.
But something happened on the way to deposit those advertising riches — a recession.
Out with the niche and in with the mass market.
“To be successful in publishing, you need economies of scale, and that means big websites with a mass audience rather than niche blogs which need to be sold separately by expensive sales teams,” Portfolio’s Felix Salmon wrote Thursday.
The goal now is to acquire television-like audiences - quality be damned. Forget the nuanced subtleties of a finely-crafted commentary - you need boatloads of posts that will attract the widest audience possible.
Nick Denton’s Gawker Media is just the latest example. Wednesday, the snarky Valleywag was folded into Gawker as part of Denton’s theory of consolidation as the recipe for riding out the financial crisis.
I don’t agree with your assessment that niche blogging will lose all sheen.In fact times to come will see more and more people indulging in niche blogging. It is understood that to have more and more traffic people do resort to some hotly traded and debated topics on web’s firmament but this traffic doesn’t get translated in to revenue. In fact revenue comes only from the visitors who visit for the content and not just pass by.
For advertisers, going after the mass market versus intensly-involved niche carries trade-offs. Ad buyers apparently feel more comfortable (and thus more willing to spend) when blogs adopt the TV market. That philosophy says that a market with 10 million viewers who are only slightly interested in the products advertised is better than 10,000 highly-motived viewers rabidly interested in the topic. Whether that concept can be successfully translated to blog readership isn’t clear. However, if you are a blog network operator, you are likely to seriously consider your advertisers wishes.
Thanks for the comment.