Re:Calacanis to Challenge TechCrunch
by notahacker on Tuesday October 05, 2010 @05:04PM
(#1761483)
Depends if you're going for quantity over quality of eyeballs. If Calcanis' newsletter provides engaging content that tech professionals with purchasing power consider a must-read then it's going to achieve much higher CPMs than tabloid-style blogging, which can make up for serving fewer impressions and being unknown to Google and the consumer audience.
The advantage of running it as an opt-in email list is that you find out much more about who your readers are.
The problem is that pot-stirring, half-wrong stories, and superficial snap judgments bring the eyeballs, inlinks, discussions, and ad revenue.
Ars Technica has managed to hold the quality fort quite well, so it's not necessarily a doomed enterprise.
"tech blogging is a race to the bottom" and we're "going for something that doesn’t exist in the market"
...to turn into...
"tech blogging is a race to the bottom, and we intend to win that race"
The problem is that pot-stirring, half-wrong stories, and superficial snap judgments bring the eyeballs, inlinks, discussions, and ad revenue.
A new online journalism needs specific ideas to break or reverse that entropic cycle -- at least locally (even if it persists globally) -- rather than just high-minded goals.