I read the other day on Sitepoint about AOL purchasing Weblogs Inc. I didn't really know how Weblogs Inc. worked before, but for a little while I loved Engadget and Joystiq, as you can probably see from a few of my earlier posts on this blog. So the way it works is Weblogs Inc. pays bloggers for posting on specific topics on their 40 or so blogs, like Engadget. Then, ads are run on the blogs, and Weblogs Inc. gets paid from that. It turns out that Weblogs Inc. gets about a million dollars a year from ad revenue. Anyway, AOL bought Weblogs Inc. for $25 million. Or they're in the process of buying it or whatever.
On the Weblogs Inc. site they have a blogger application and I think bloggers get paid by the post. But I think you have to be an expert on one of the topics or at least be really passionate about it.
This also got me thinking about making a content based site. A lot of sites (I'm guessing) are profitable through ad revenue alone but they just have such great content that the fans just keep coming back and the ads are targeted to them. So I'm wondering what kind of content site Alex, Jay, and/or I could create. It would have to be a relatively specific topic that we care about, and something that we are knowledgeable about. Probably the most likely topic would be video games, but we don't exactly know stuff that most other gamers don't know, and we don't exactly have the money to get a lot of games. One idea I had about this topic is to cover the hidden gems, which are games that are really good that nobody knows about.
Another idea I recently had was a site about web design for beginners. I was thinking that it's hard to find tutorials on XHTML or CSS for people who don't do web design. Most of the tutorials teach HTML and teach bad coding practices, or 90s style web design with tables and other old ways to do things. So I'm thinking I could probably write tutorials and guides on XHTML so people can learn web design the correct way. Plus I would write CSS guides as well. I still have to look up some more sites on this to see which ones are covering this topic for this audience I want to target. I'm also going to run this by some people to see what they think.
I think both of these content ideas are decent, but not great. Well, they'll have to be refined some more if they're to become great. I'm still trying to think of some other content site ideas. I'm not sure what else I'm good at that isn't already covered in a bazillion other nerd sites.
Add new comment