The Gentleman Ranters site, which describes itself as ‘the last pub in Fleet Street’, publishes an edition each Friday, circulated to its email subscribers (there’s no RSS feed), with a variable number of stories, sometimes 12, sometimes two.
While it’s not making money from subscriptions or advertising, its steady traffic, for its once-a-week publishing model, is worth flagging up. Its editor, Revel Barker, says it received 22,769 visits to the site last Friday (11 June), and around 7,000 every day last week. It seems like Barker has identified a niche audience.
The question now is how to monetise that following. “The problem is working out what journalists (and in my case, mainly retired journalists) spend their money on,” Barker tells me.
Writing on his site, Barker says (NB: numbers refer to visits, not unique visitors):
Nearly three million people have clicked on the site in the past 12 months – or, to be accurate, in the past year an unknown number of readers has clicked on the site nearly three million times, in total. It seems quite a lot.
(…)
What we know is that most people who log on every week (between 20,000 and 40,000 on a typical Friday) are along for the free ride.
Free, because there’s no subscription. Also free because they don’t contribute to it in any other way.
And that’s sad, because all they can do – most of the people reading this – is write. But then they are used to getting things for nothing, I guess.
22,769 might sound like a big number but if it’s not unique users and if you take the search engine indexing visits out, the number of people visiting the site is going to be much smaller. And – it’s not making any money.
A far more useful case study in once-a-week publishing (and one that would offer some hope to journalists) would be a site that offers some sign that it will generate a return. This example merely illustrates the big problem with the internet – anyone can put a website up but it’s a lot, lot harder to make it pay. You could even say this is a case study in how not to do it.
As I understand it, “case study” is a neutral term, and your point was precisely my point: he’s identified a regular audience, but has so far failed to monetise it. So how does the individual blogger do that? I also wanted to flag up that he only publishes once a week (which is unusual for an online-only site) and still generates significant traffic.
I’ve now had an interesting email exchange with Revel and I think it’s worth adding a few extra points. His point about traffic is not that he’s trying to build it, but he’s curious about where it comes from. He’s more interested in getting his readers to contribute – or look at his associated books site. Since he hasn’t gone down an advertising or subscription path, the traffic level is a bit irrelevant.
He says: “It started as a blog shared by around 20 old colleagues. At the end of the first week it had 200 readers. That was three years ago. Look at it now. And most of the original 20 old hands still make up the regular contributors and the rest get a free ride.”
The point is that he does it for fun, and if it were for money he’d do something else, so monetisation is not an issue.
You can read his post here in full – and find his books site here: http://booksaboutjournalism.com/
My original point of interest was that he manages to sustain traffic (whether he’s bothered about it or not) by simply publishing on a Friday, whereas other bloggers often publish everyday and throughout the day. It seems like quite an efficient way of blogging to me…