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.

Full post at this link…