I love the business model of a client of ours, Down East Magazine in Maine. They publish a monthly magazine but have diversified well with an ecommerce store selling "made in Maine" goods, and they sell Maine experiences, both to locals and tourists including writing courses, photography workshops, birdwatching experiences, etc. - Melissa
Selling local experiences is still WAY outside the box for most local media outlets. Wow, that's cool to find your client magazine has been successfully doing that!
At least somewhat like Down East, the The Post and Courier (Charleston, SC) has also branched out into selling locally-focused merchandise:
Good post. Disagree that building an audience is easy though. For every youtuber (example) with even 100k views, there have to be thousands who gave up after getting zero traction.
Hi Simon. This is not about the topic in hand but it might be an idea for you.
How easy is it to compete against established newsletters / blogs from scratch? After all, many niche sites (like mine) have now been going for a decade or more which allows them to permeate deeply into the community of that niche.
Technically it has never been easier to start a niche site as a side project. You could download WordPress and be competing against me by the end of the day for zero cost.
More interestingly, of course, there is also zero extra cost for readers in reading a competitor - so, again, it should be easy for them to grow. You may love Site A but there is no extra cost (except your time) in adding the new Site B to your roster.
And yet, with huge stickiness (we all have bookmarks to sites from years ago we probably wouldn't bookmark today), just being 'as good' as an existing site isn't going to be enough. A Red Ventures-backed site recently lost a reported $5m trying to compete against me in the UK and ended up folding.
I love the business model of a client of ours, Down East Magazine in Maine. They publish a monthly magazine but have diversified well with an ecommerce store selling "made in Maine" goods, and they sell Maine experiences, both to locals and tourists including writing courses, photography workshops, birdwatching experiences, etc. - Melissa
Selling local experiences is still WAY outside the box for most local media outlets. Wow, that's cool to find your client magazine has been successfully doing that!
At least somewhat like Down East, the The Post and Courier (Charleston, SC) has also branched out into selling locally-focused merchandise:
https://betternews.org/post-and-courier-mini-publisher/
Good post. Disagree that building an audience is easy though. For every youtuber (example) with even 100k views, there have to be thousands who gave up after getting zero traction.
Hi Simon. This is not about the topic in hand but it might be an idea for you.
How easy is it to compete against established newsletters / blogs from scratch? After all, many niche sites (like mine) have now been going for a decade or more which allows them to permeate deeply into the community of that niche.
Technically it has never been easier to start a niche site as a side project. You could download WordPress and be competing against me by the end of the day for zero cost.
More interestingly, of course, there is also zero extra cost for readers in reading a competitor - so, again, it should be easy for them to grow. You may love Site A but there is no extra cost (except your time) in adding the new Site B to your roster.
And yet, with huge stickiness (we all have bookmarks to sites from years ago we probably wouldn't bookmark today), just being 'as good' as an existing site isn't going to be enough. A Red Ventures-backed site recently lost a reported $5m trying to compete against me in the UK and ended up folding.