Member Article

Niche bloggers in a BuzzFeed world

In an interesting, and generally accurate, article published recently by The Guardian, Felix Salmon makes the following claim:

“The small but self-sustaining bloggy site is a thing of the past: if you’re not getting 20-30 million unique visitors every month, and don’t aspire to such heights, then you’re basically an economic irrelevance. Advertisers won’t touch you, you won’t make any money, and your remaining visitors will inexorably leach away as they move from their desktops to their phones.”

This poses an interesting question. Is there a space between the hobby blogger and the media giant in which a viable living can be made? I think so. In fact, I think there has never been a better time for bloggers who offer expert and in-depth content to a specific niche. The trick is to find the right niche, the right audience, and to create content of value to that audience. There are dozens of examples of people doing just that.

I’m not talking about bloggers like Andrew Sullivan who converted a measure of mainstream media fame into a successful solo blogging enterprise. I mean people who have founded sustainable blogs from essentially nothing.

Examples of writers doing just what Salmon claims is no longer possible abound: Federico Viticci at MacStories, Shawn Blanc, John Gruber, Ben Thompson at Stratechery, Maria Popova at BrainPickings, and many others.

Each of these sites is (or began) as a single individual sharing their passion and knowledge with a relatively limited audience. All of them carry advertising or make money through affiliate sales. And some, like Ben Thompson, make a good living through subscriptions for premium content. There is a healthy viable business model for solo bloggers — they offer something very different from the generalist media giants like Buzzfeed and The Guardian. No editor at either of those publications would accept a 25,000-word eye-poppingly detailed comparison of iOS Twitter clients, but there is a large enough audience for that content that MacStories is a success. Not a success according to the Silicon Valley measure — there are no billion-dollar IPOs to be had here — but there are solid sustainable businesses.

In fact, a recent article showed us that some solo bloggers are doing very well indeed. Pat Flynn who runs Smart Passive Income published his earnings for September, and a combination of affiliate sales and advertising brought in almost $100, 000 for that month. Tom Ewer’s blog brings in around $10,000 a month. Now, these guys are outliers. That level of success is in no way likely or guaranteed to everyone who starts a blog. But it does serve to demonstrate that Salmon is way off the mark in his analysis. The “small but self-sustaining bloggy site” is not a thing of the past; it’s very much a thing of the present and the future.

There is a definite shift in the media landscape. Old publishers are being pushed out, “vertically integrated digital media companies” are flourishing, but the old saw about the web giving everyone a voice is still true, and the most committed and original of those voices, with a lot of luck, will find audience whose eyeballs and subscriptions will pay for their work. There’s never been a better time to be a solo publisher.

About Graeme Caldwell—Graeme works as an inbound marketer for Nexcess, a leading provider of Magento and WordPress hosting. Follow Nexcess on Twitter at @nexcess, Like them on Facebook and check out their tech/hosting blog, http://blog.nexcess.net/.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Graeme Caldwell .