{"id":1607,"date":"2007-11-27T11:43:19","date_gmt":"2007-11-27T16:43:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/index.php\/2007\/11\/27\/so-much-for-yourclimblingcom-yourmtbcom\/"},"modified":"2007-11-29T09:05:20","modified_gmt":"2007-11-29T17:05:20","slug":"so-much-for-yourclimblingcom-yourmtbcom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/index.php\/2007\/11\/27\/so-much-for-yourclimblingcom-yourmtbcom\/","title":{"rendered":"So much for yourclimbing.com, yourmtb.com"},"content":{"rendered":"

These are two sites whose creators hoped they could hire an “enthusiast-in-chief” to attract readers, let users contribute the rest, and build a niche community and, ergo, a business. Steve Outing, one of the founders, says they’re throwing in the towel because user-generated content has a bad habit of not<\/em> generating much readership. <\/a><\/p>\n

What happened with us is that we did attract a core group of regulars. Folks who we categorized as “super-enthusiasts” did join in the spirit of our sites and participated frequently. I saw them recommend our sites to their friends, and some of them showed up. While a few of those people stuck around, many more participated a little bit, then faded away. Our growth in traffic was slow and steady, but unremarkable, and not enough to sustain a business.

In hindsight, I think we tried to rely too heavily on user submitted content. Even though a lot of it was really great, the overall experience was weak when compared to, say, reading a climbing or a mountain biking magazine filled with quality professional content throughout.

We believed that having a core level of professional content \u2013- from our site editors -\u2013 would be enough to attract a loyal following even if the user-submitted content wasn’t enough on its own. But I think we didn’t have nearly enough of that. If I had any money left to throw at the business, I’d hire more well-known athletes and adventurers, so that the core was a larger pool of professional content — and I’d mix that in with the best user content.<\/font><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Steve says his mountain biking site got about 75,000 page views a month. If you sell ads it works out to about 10 bucks a day per ad. Now if you were living in rural Zimbabwe you might be able to live on that, though finding a high-speed connection might be a bit of a challenge.<\/p>\n

I wrote about these sites in September 2006<\/a> and had a conversation with Steve in which he argued that mountain biking and climbing had better business prospects than, say, hiking, because climbers and mountain bikers are more passionate about their sports.<\/p>\n

Maybe they’re nuts about ’em, but they’re not nuts enough<\/em>, it turns out. I feel sorta vindicated that after being told, in essence, “well, we just don’t think there’s enough audience to justify a ‘Your Hiking’ site.” Turns out there weren’t enough eyeballs for their ideas, either.<\/p>\n

The challenge with making a go of “user generated” content is that any user good enough to create stuff people want to see will already have a day job doing the same work, and giving it away online without a paycheck attached just reduces the market value of their work.<\/p>\n

I can rationalize having a hiking blog because there’s no market demand for this content anyway. I’m taking time away from chasing down free-lance writing and editing gigs, but paid gigs require much more effort (and thought, but you knew that).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

These are two sites whose creators hoped they could hire an “enthusiast-in-chief” to attract readers, let users contribute the rest, and build a niche community and, ergo, a business. Steve Outing, one of the founders, says they’re throwing in the…<\/p>\n

Read the whole thing<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[35],"tags":[502,125],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1607"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1607"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1607\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}