I found this on Techcrunch’s subscription process interesting.
Matching those revenues was a structural advantage in terms of traffic. As one of the most venerable sites covering tech on the web, major announcements from Elon Musk, Tesla, Apple, Facebook and other big technology companies drove heavy traffic to TechCrunch. Most of this was relayed via Google Search and Google News, and at times, more than 90% of the site’s traffic came from just those two sources. Critically, this coverage was eminently affordable. Writing up an article on the latest ravings of Elon Musk might take about 15 minutes (there usually wasn’t that much to say other than his statement, after all), but that one article could drive 100,000 page views or more. That was the secret treasure that funded the real in-depth reporting: cheap coverage of a big tech company coupled with the lucre of comparatively extraordinary ad revenue.
Lux Capital
I find the above to be true broadly for most media companies. I also find it to be a horrible long-term strategy. You are not building any affinity for your product or your brand or your reputation. You’re simply submitting yourself to the machine.
The most important challenge of modern media is balancing an audience’s desire for certain types of stories with a human reporter’s ability to deliver them. Unlike a tech company building an app or a cloud service, this is not an easy product to iterate. If you want to improve coverage of the automotive industry, an editor must seek out and develop a reporter who loves cars and understands how they get manufactured; what points of competition exist between companies; what auto economics are and how they are changing; and what disruption might look like for the industry in the years ahead. Passion plus perspective plus precision is asking a lot of one person or even a small band of reporters.
Lux Capital
It might be asking a lot (it is), but Passion plus perspective plus precision is also a worthy mission statement for any media company or individual.