The Standalone News Site

So, after all this depressing talk, you are going to open a news site not connected to any other medium or try to keep one you already own alive. Look at some of the characteristics shared by some of the more successful ones:

• Drudge Report: Tiny staff, large readership.

• News.com: Large staff, huge readership.

• TheRegister: Small staff, large readership.

• Wired News: Small staff, large readership.

You get the pattern. Large staff and a small readership simply won't cut it. Most of the sites noted above focus on tech news, but they could as easily focus on other areas traditionally neglected or barely covered by general-audience media. The Drudge Report is an exception; it covers… well, whatever it is it covers, but the Webmaster does it with hardly any help at all, and his all-text site uses next to no bandwidth or server space so his technical costs per reader are negligible. Drudge can sell ads for a dollar or two per thousand and make money.

You could do worse than following one part of Drudge's original "recipe," and starting out as a one-person operation. It might be even better to have two people: one to do the reporting, and one to do the marketing, with the marketing person focusing primarily on building an audience until you start getting around one million pageviews per month, and on advertising sales after that. Keep graphics to a minimum, search out a reliable, low-cost Web site hosting service, and your salary, plus your partner's if you have one, will be your only sizable outlay. If you have enough savings or outside capital to live for two years, plus $1,000 or so per month to pay server bills and other expenses until you get some ad money coming in, that's all you need to get your site going. Whether you start turning a profit before you run out of capital is subject to many uncontrollable factors, but if you follow the site design precepts laid out in this book, and you are a diligent reporter providing unique coverage of an area that interests enough people to provide you (and prospective advertisers) with enough eyeballs to make ads on your site valuable, you will have a fighting chance.