by Jacqueline Koch | Dec 14, 2015 |
If you live in West Seattle, a neighborhood just southwest of downtown Seattle, and you’ve lost your dog or are curious about the wail of a police siren, there is only one place to go: the West Seattle Blog (WSB).
Residents know that within minutes of any significant event happening in the area, they’ll be able to get breaking news as it unfolds on the blog – day or night. They’re also be able to find out about restaurants opening and closing, traffic conditions on the West Seattle Bridge (the only way in and out of the neighborhood, for many residents) and who are the best roofers in the area.
Launched in 2005 as the personal blog of editor Tracy Record, WSB attracts weekly visits from more than 35,000 homes and businesses including more than 10,000 who visit daily. Thanks to strong support from readers and advertisers, by 2008, Record was able to convert her hobby into a family business. She quit her job to edit WSB full-time and her husband Patrick Sand joined her to take on ad sales. This bold move by the husband-and-wife team made WSB the first financially self-sustaining local online news organization in the Seattle area. Advertising revenue generated from almost 100
local sponsors is the sole source of income for their three-person household and also covers business expenses, including paid freelance journalists, photographers, and developers.
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by Jacqueline Koch | Nov 19, 2015 |
From humble beginnings in 2004 as a daily email targeted to men in New York City, lifestyle destination Thrillist has grown steadily and has evolved one city and one topic at a time.
Today, the site operates in over 30 markets, including a few outside the United States like London and Amsterdam, and attracts more than 15m unique visitors each month. Thrillist.com is one of three properties owned by Thrillist Media Group (TMG); the others are ecommerce site JackThreads and tech site Supercompressor.
Not content with steady growth of core businesses, earlier this summer, TMG CEO Ben Lerer was out and about talking to potential investors. The result was a US$54m investment from German publisher Axel Springer, Oak Partners and SBNY (formerly Softbank) in late September. To appeal to investors who were interested in either content or commerce, but not both, TMG decided to split Thrillist and JackThreads as separate businesses, with Axel Springer being the lead investor for the content site.
This week, it became clear how Ben Leher, now the CEO of Thrillist and chairman of JackThreads, plans to spend some of the new capital. Building on the company’s history of continuous geographic expansion, Thrillist is now expanding its vertical coverage beyond food and drink to include health, entertainment as well as sex and dating.
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by Jacqueline Koch | Nov 19, 2015 |
By David Darby
This spring ushered in momentous change in the media distribution and consumption landscape. Novel content delivery methods offer publishers exciting opportunities for engagement, but also exposure to clear risks and dizzying complexity.
| Consumers have faster access to quality content as a result of the growth in mobile delivery. Standing in line at the grocery store, we can raise our smartphones to easily discover and read compelling news articles as the line inches forward. But when mobile content is discovered via Facebook feeds, an Apple News app, or similar gated spaces, publishers must weigh the gain in reach against a loss in control.
Now with this month’s launch of Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), publishers have new reason for excitement, concern, and a bit of confusion.
How does your garden grow?
Facebook, of course, owns the most acreage in the world of “walled gardens”. These self-contained web environments direct and control a user’s content navigation with the goal of meeting so many of their needs, they won’t see a reason to leave.
And it’s a rich plot of garden to hoe: the longer a user stays on the site, the more data Facebook collects, allowing it to more accurately target users with the ads that power the company’s US$12bn annual revenue. |
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