Recession will see many of your fav products/companies/blogs shutting shop/st
opping their service.
The first one to join the list is valleywag – one of the most amazing blog with a great sense of humor (a personal all-time favorite) .
Though VW is not shutting down, it will be merged with Gawker.com (the parent company, which also owns LifeHacker) – and Owen will manage the show all by himself (with some loss of punch?) – in short, it won’t be the same again.
VW has great community, but I guess community don’t get you traffic – forget about $$s.
And that’s the challenge with any content portal/blogs – look at the big ones, they don’t read what you comment there. They don’t just care about the community – all they want is PVs.
Infact, many of them keep refreshing the page every 45 seconds (you will see more of these in the next few days) – with a definite assumption that you have no intention to comment there.
Community vs. Monetization
That’s a great debate and will continue – the best example is lack of monetization in social networks.
Community sites are still not monetized optimally and very few have been able to crack the problem (rather nobody has!).
And that’s largely because blogs are meant to have a ‘reader friendly format’, supposed to publish full feeds (how many news portal do that?) – I believe, things will change in the next few months, as we see ad pricing heading southwards – so don’t be surprise if bloggers become ‘more-like-news-sites‘
What’s your take? Given a choice, will you build a community portal/blog or a transactional one?
By the way, an apt observation by VW on TC:
“TechCrunch gets to pretend we don’t exist, which makes them look like a bunch of five-year-olds. Everybody wins!
Related: Display Ads Pricing down by 27%
I love the caption contest on VW . But Valleywags biggest problem was its USP .its a site focus only and only on valley & ppl in valley . otherwise how can you expect Brittney Bonet to be treated like a subject of serious paparazzi. it can scale only so much . apart from that B2B client will not be advertising on site like VW [They should IMHO]and most of the B2C stuff online is free and the funding to them is drying up so they can’t afford the advertisement.
Coming back to your Q . Community can make money and can be s sustainable too .Two points here your revenue stream shouldn’t compromise with your core value proposition and your niche audience should be big enough .
slashdot is an example so is Engadget.