Beyond Tech News: General Media Online

The precepts are the same for mainstream news online as for tech news: You need to find an information niche which no one else is filling well, and develop a targeted audience that at least some advertisers will pay a premium to reach.

An obvious niche is geographical; newspapers and local broadcasters are natural online news outlets, but many seem confounded by the World Wideness of the Web and have trouble using it effectively as a local medium. This is changing as journalism schools and industry organizations like the American Press Institute pay more attention to online news delivery and how to profit from it.

Another obvious way to target a news niche is by topic or special interest. FreeRepublic.com, a grassroots conservative political news and discussion Web site, has attracted an ardent enough (and large enough) following that reader donations cover its entire operating budget.

A third popular method of targeting a news Web site is to pick out a constituency like women or college students. But targeting groups whose members may not have much in common beyond sex or age is a tough job, and advertisers have not shown much inclination to pay premium rates to sites with such loosely defined readership demographics.

So far, the most successful method of targeting online readership seems to be by topic. Rap music listeners, automotive performance buffs, and frequent moviegoers all represent definable non-technical interest groups attractive to specific advertisers. Note that picking out an audience defined by its probable interest in purchasing a specific group of products or services is the most profit-centric way to build a Web site. It is a concept that follows naturally from the idea, discussed in Chapter 1, that from a business perspective a news Web site is an ad delivery vehicle that uses editorial content as a way to get readers to look at ads, not a vehicle for content that "just happens" to have ads on some or all of its pages.