I find surprising that sites like Gigaom and Dr. Dobbs which actually try to provide value to their users with original content, die because their ad revenues are not suffice to cover up their costs, while site like Buzzfeed, filled with clickbaity headlines, and dumb articles, pass $100M in revenues[1].<p>Perhaps, it seems like 'content-is-the-king' is not optimal if you are looking for revenues.<p>[1]: <a href="http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/media/2014/11/8557366/buzzfeed-passes-100-m-revenue-2014" rel="nofollow">http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/media/2014/11/8557366/...</a>
I found this article frustrating for its avoidance of assigning blame or fault to any of the decisions described.<p>For example: It seems pretty clear that a bunch of work was done on a research product for GigaOm, but their thinking around it was very off target. $79/year is less than a Netflix account costs. Yet, the author doesn't come out and say "and this proved to be a big mistake."<p>GigaOm sounds like a scenario where people were "playing startup" for several years and eventually reality set in. They appear to have never been profitable, yet they acquired a company, took out a disastrous loan and raised more and more money. From what I'm reading in articles like this, the people running GigaOm sound like they made a lot of dumb decisions, yes, but it also sounds like GigaOm was never really a real business at any point.
Not clear from this or other pieces I've read how much of the downfall had to do with the news part of the business although--as others have said--the cost structure may have been relatively high and the traffic, compared to clickbaity and more consumer-oriented sites, was relatively low. What does seem to have been the case from this piece and one or two others is that there was a lot of pressure to grow the research side of the business and they were "investing" a lot to do this.<p>In my experience, their research was a bit of a mixed bag. They were trying new business models with primarily a lot of freelancers. Some of it worked. Some of it didn't. They had some smart folks in their stable who did a nice job for a reasonable cost doing things like webinars. Let's just say other dealings weren't as positive.
I think Gigaom had a harder time competing in an ever-increasing market against sites like HN end even Quora where the comments (especially here in HN) I often find insightful.<p>I wonder if Om had returned to the helm, cut staff/costs, and made Gigaom much more about his own preoccupations and interests, that would have worked better.<p>I liked the 'world of Om' a lot and I think this has potential for attracting an audience. Maybe all it needs is 2-3 staff members if that.<p>Kind of a Gruber/Stratechery/Quora/HN/Reddit hybrid.
The state of the media industry (i.e. failure of Gigaom and the success of Buzzfeed) seems to be a pretty strong counterexample to the oft-given advice by YC and others that "It’s better to build something a small number of users love than something a lot of users like"[1].<p>[1] <a href="http://blog.samaltman.com/startup-advice-briefly" rel="nofollow">http://blog.samaltman.com/startup-advice-briefly</a>
Gigaom is a really boring news site. I read a lot of tech news and blogs and never come across a link to Gigaom. Has the HN front page ever linked to a Gigaom story?