Niche content news: Fighting for pennies takes as much work as fighting for bountiful wads of cash
My hopes for hyper-focused news and information sites took a beating when I read the lament of an independent filmmaker on The Long Tail. Here’s a quote:
I create and produce “paddlesports” content. Canoes and kayaks. … My reality as a content creator and producer is that it is basically not possible for anyone in the “normal” realm to make a living in this Long Tail space. … I need to find multiple large national distributors if I hope to even come close to making a living at this game. And I need to produce fresh content on a reasonably frequent basis.
It comes down to the relationship between effort and return. A high-quality story for an audience of one (or a hyper-local audience of a neighborhood) takes as much work as a high-quality story for an audience of 1 million.
There are many ways to decrease the labor cost or maximize the size of your niche audience, but all create additional costs or lack maintainability. A rundown of solutions / problems with them:
- User-generated content / Who manages it (a lack of sufficient quality or usefulness will kill any audience building efforts)? Who spends the hours motivating volunteers? How long will volunteers accept someone else getting paid for their work?
- Leverage social-networking tools to market your content, as explained here / Done effectively, that’s a job on top of your content-producing job.
- Distribute distribution / OK, but how big is your niche audience? How affluent?
- Create a network of niches / 10,000 niches are 10,000 times more expensive than 1 niche. You could sell that larger audience, but 10,000 content producers would be waiting for a check.
All of this is occurring as attention continues to fragment.
Sigh.
Journalism, in an environment where information is ubiquitous and costs little to access, needs to move toward becoming a news and information service business, and away from an audience-aggregation business.
Who will be the customers of this much smaller business? The Web sites springing up that provide a specific tool or service. They’ll need fresh, focused, high-quality news and information.
Who’s going to provide it?
You bring up a lot of good points - especially about the role journalism and the organizations that support them - will have to play in the near future.
However, I’m a firm believer that high-quality content will always find a high-quality audience - no matter the size - given enough time, effort and attention by its producer. The problem is - as it always has been - time, effort, and attention are expensive and finite.
Living in the Long Tail…
By now, we have all heard of Chris Anderson’s Long Tail theory. As someone who has promoted independent music, used to own a record label, and who still does a spot of music making himself - The Long Tail has been a particular interest of mine si…
Eric, thanks for writing. The issue is not so much that niche-focused, high-quality is valuable (it is), but at what rate/extent it is valuable. If it takes 50 years to provide a sufficient return on a resource investment, then it will not be a useful way for the producer to support him/herself. There is also a huge marketing problem. It’s harder to stand out on the Web because you can’t imprison audiences and though I want to believe that high-quality work will sell itself, I don’t. I’ve seen plenty of amazing efforts and products go unnoticed and unrewarded to an extent commensurate with their quality. Marketing is the issue.