CNET on Sports blogs (or Niche vs. Reach)
CNET quoted me for a story on DailyKos going into the sports blog business. Wanted to clear up this section:
“If I was going to launch a blog network right now, I’d pick one (niche area) and own it,” said Jason Calacanis, the co-founder of Weblogs Inc., which he recently sold to AOL for a reported $25 million. “Sports is great, because everyone has an opinion, and there’s a lot of people whose voices have not been heard….The big problem (is that) there are not big endemic advertisers for sports like there are for cars or gadgets.”
Bleszinski disagreed. He thinks the Pepsis of the world will eventually flock to SportsBlogs as they see the potential for reaching a large, mostly young male audience.
OK, so what I‘m saying here is that sports doesn’t have endemic advertisers beyond things like golf clubs or baseball hats. Blezinski disagrees and says Pepsi will eventually flock to sports blogs. Which, in fact, means he DOES NOT disagree with me at all. Pepsi is NOT an endemic advertiser and the fact that they will “eventually” come proves my point exactly! Endemic advertisers (a car company on autoblog, a gadget company on Engadget, etc) show up almost immediately, non-endemic advertisers–those that are buying a demographic–show up when you have reach. Reach today means over well over one million unique US visitors (with 150M Americans online 1M uniques would be under < 1% –not much reach).
Reach is what the big boys and girls sell–folks like MSN, Yahoo, and AOL. Niche, startup publisher can’t sell reach–they can sell reach within a vertical MAYBE. For example, we can say that we have 10% of the 20M car enthusists out there, or something like that.
