While the digital publishing world was preoccupied with the iPad and Twitter this week, some important developments gave us all a little more evidence of how the landscape for local media continues to evolve. All Voices announced global expansion, Demand Media is reportedly looking at an IPO and HelloMetro has expanded all over the U.S.
No matter how you feel about “content farms” or all-volunteer news services, they are a force to be reckoned with. Do they degrade the quality of journalism available to audiences or fill in the gaps that mainstream media never could? If you think yourself a purist, would you turn down a job at one of these new media companies (or the many others emerging today)?
More importantly, what lessons can be learned by their success?
Here’s a quick roundup:
AllVoices, which competes with NowPublic in the “citizen media” market, announced expansion into 30 countries. “In effect, the company is attempting to create a Reuters-style service that brings news and insight from places that traditional media entities aren’t covering, either because they don’t care or because they’ve cut back their foreign reporting budgets,” Matthew Ingram wrote at GigaOm.
Aki Hashmi of All Voices — a former Knight-Ridder and Reuters executive — told Ingram the site has grown by over 400 percent in the past year and now has 337,000 contributors in 180 countries generating 4 million unique visits per month.
“If you look at AP and Reuters, they have about 40-50 percent of the world covered,” says Hashmi. “But how do you cover the rest of the world? You need a global network of professional and citizen reporters.”
Ingram found one reporter who calls himself “California Mike” who has contributed 386 reports and 789 comments and his stories have generated over 800,000 page views.
Demand Media is exploring an IPO according to paidContent. Goldman Sachs, one of Demand’s investors, is apprently leading the charge. The news gave Rafat Ali a chance to publicly ask several questions many media watches have been wondering about the controversial “content farm,” including:
- What percentage of Demand’s revenues is its domain business eNom?
- How big is its social media products business centered around Pluck? “While major media companies including Gannett and our own parent Guardian News have adopted the social tools platform,” Ali writes, “almost everyone on the publisher side I have spoken over the years has mixed feelings about the product, in part for being too unwieldy and not up-to-mark on latest social media and tech innovations (their words, not mine).”
- How big is Demand Studios, which Ali says is called by various names such as “content farm”, “content factory”, and “McContent.” A cover story in Wired last year generated a lot of heat all around the media/publishing industry.
- How much is that army of freelancers getting paid?
HelloMetro has expanded to 40 markets and added national coverage, according to the Local Onliner. The company relies on a team of 25 journalists to produce content who are supported by 10 salespeople. Impressive scale, considering the homepage boasts more than 1,500 “hyperlocal” sites.
Peter Krasilovsky offers other interesting data points:
- In 2009, the site had 4.1 million unique users a month, and is on target for 5.2 million unique visitors in 2010.
- Founder Clark Scott says the site has been profitable for two years. In 2009, the site grossed $5.5 million and earned $100,000 in profits.
- HelloFlight, an airplane and airport news and tracking service, gets about 380,000 unique visitors a month and represents about 2 percent of the company’s business.
- Scott expects to eventually add 25 more journalists to the site.
No related posts.
I must have missed something.
Re what freelancers are getting paid by Demand Media: not much (from what I hear from people who've both wrote for Demand and who have considered writing for Demand.)
A more important question to ask might be: is it journalism?