Right now the venture-funded content-aggregator Gather falls short of the mark. Which is a bit of a shame, since they’re willing to share revenue with the people who provide the content, and I’m all in favor of that. But the execution’s all wrong. Lots of people have been giving advice, so why not one more? If I were face-to-face with the founders of Gather, here’s what I’d tell them:
- Your site’s too damn broad – it includes all content of all possible types, and therefore forces each visitor to move from the general to the specific when they visit the site. Get narrower. I think Newsvine‘s focus on ‘news’ is still a little broad. Memeorandum‘s focus on ‘tech news’ or ‘political news’, on the other hand, is probably about right.
- I don’t want to have to go to Gather to contribute content. I’ve got a blog right here, and it works for me. Make it easy for me to add my content in both places. I could add my RSS feed to Gather, for instance, and simultaneously dual-publish. Ideally, you create blogging-platform plugins that allow me to specify when I want a post to go to Gather and when I don’t. (I’d suggest a microformat-and-crawler solution, but there’s too many crawlers out there already.)
- You can’t sell advertisements against everything, as much as you might want to – sites that are general and unpredictable and contain god-knows-what content from god-knows-whom are forced to sell run-of-network untargeted stuff for low CPMs or contract out to more sophisticated ad platforms – a contextual product like Google’s AdSense or a behavioral network like Tacoda. None of these options are as good as tight, focused content, which can be used to command high CPM rates from the advertisers in that niche.
- If you take my advice and focus focus focus, you won’t be able to use all the content you get. Some of it just won’t fit – you won’t be able to run ‘nearly vegetarian cassoulet’ recipes alongside poorly thought out political rants. So what do you do with all the content you get that doesn’t fit? Sell it! For anything that doesn’t fit your core niches – anything you can’t get good advertising dollars for – you should act as the content-contributors’ agent, helping them make deals with other sites in an automated way. Say you decide to focus on travel-related content, targetting the deep pockets of the travel industry. Sell the food-related content to a cooking-oriented site. Sell the product reviews to a comparison shopping engine. Sell anything anybody wants to republish, as long as you’ve got blanket permission from the content providers and the price is right.
The above advice isn’t just for Gather – any content aggregator with ambitions could step up now and become the first general business agent for small publishers, taking over the business development function (which few small publishers have time for anyway) and monetizing their content aggressively. This is a critical hole that’s only going to get bigger as more and more revenue-sharing and other republishing-for-profit options become available over the next couple of years.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Greg – I like your take. Maybe you could be an adviser to Noodly? We wouldn’t need you to do anything, just have a chat sometime.
–Pete
Greg – good insights on this issue. Amazing how many companies have popped into the reader/aggregator/annotater space, and how few have figured it out to make it work. Makes me want to raise some money and start rolling them all up – perhaps with all these passionate people working together, all the pieces might fall in place…