There were some good comments on our first post about MyBallard.com, the online-only neighborhood news effort run by my wife and me. Lost Remote reader Aaron asked the most pointed questions. “It takes more than passion to build a business. It takes a truly sustainable business model,” he wrote. “How much money does the property make? How truly sustainable is that revenue stream or more pointedly, how sustainable would it be for someone other than those who started it?”
Of course, this gets to the heart of the matter, and these are the exact questions that media companies are asking as they evaluate the hyperlocal space. Here in Seattle, WestSeattleBlog.com has a full slate of SMB advertisers. CapitolHillSeattle.com and MyBallard.com are just getting started with unique approaches to advertising. The early indications are extremely positive, but like any newly emerging business model, it’s impossible to know how it will scale. There’s an element of risk, and that’s why most local media companies have remained on the sidelines.
In the meantime, sites like the WestSeattleBlog are developing a strong first-mover advantage by building loyal communities. Aaron argues that “community building done by blogs is easily duplicated,” and while I would agree in the sense of a typical niche blog like Lost Remote, I can’t disagree more when it comes to strong neighborhood news sites. Getting critical mass in these communities is extremely difficult — you can’t simply start a site and link it from SeattleTimes.com and expect a vibrant community to appear out of nowhere. WestSeattleBlog, MyBallard and CapitolHillSeattle have worked long and hard, at the grassroots level, to build our audiences and contributors. We attend neighborhood events, introduce ourselves to anyone we can, hand out postcards, answer nearly every email — a TV ad can’t replicate this, especially when you consider we live here. As WSB’s Tracy Record says, “the community is a partner, not just an audience.”
This makes neighborhood news sites a different animal than your average blog or news site. It creates unique barriers to entry — media companies don’t have the resources to build communities “by hand” across dozens of neighborhoods, and their attempts to automate it are met with limited success. But we’re reaching a critical mass of audience in dense geographic areas. As a result, we see a steady stream of tips, observations and discussion that yield original, exclusive content that’s very difficult to replicate.
Aaron’s next argument is that the publishers of these particular news sites have skills that are atypical and difficult to replicate. In other words, that these sites are anomalies, they prove nothing, and their market value is diminished because if the publishers left, the sites would fail. True, WSB’s Tracy Record has a long background in TV and online news. CapitolHillSeattle’s Justin Carder used to work for MSN. And both my wife and I have a long background in TV and online media. We’re not your average “bloggers.”
But I’ll argue that the value we bring to the table is helping prove the model, not necessarily sustaining it. There are plenty of enterprising journalists out there who could take the reins of MyBallard, with a little training, without missing much of a beat. (By the way, I believe as more journalists leave the traditional news business, more neighborhood news sites will appear.) For us, though, the sales side has yet to be proven. And that brings us back to the original question.
Is there a truly sustainable business model? By building hard-to-replicate communities with exclusive content, I believe we’re well on our way. But only time will tell. We’ll be posting more on Lost Remote as we continue our conversation about neighborhood news. Please keep the comments coming!