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of
Sugar,
Inc. have enjoyed after building their own
blog network. They got started four years ago when Lisa
began blogging about celebrity gossip in her spare time. A
media empire has since sprouted from that small seed with
the Sugars operating a dozen blogs (including
PopSugar about celebrities and BellaSugar about
beauty) and attracting 11 million readers a month!
That flood of traffic soon had advertisers like Chanel
and Sony knocking on their door and, with
backing from Sequoia Capital, the company has grown
to 105 employees.
The
Sugar's revenue has shot up 20% in the first six
months of this year while their closest counterpart in the
traditional media world - magazines - saw
their ad revenues plunge 21% over the same time
frame. One of the earliest and biggest blog
networks, Gawker
Media, enjoyed an even bigger jump than the
Sugars with ad revenue soaring 45% in the first six
months of 2009.
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Ms. Miller
noted "Both companies are private, and neither would
disclose more specific figures, but by some estimates the
larger networks have annual revenue in the low tens of
millions of dollars." Those numbers illustrate
the massive opportunity the web offers new media
entrepreneurs. However, this is far from easy money.
“It’s actually really hard creating compelling
content that brings an audience,” Mr. Sugar told the
Times. The key to success is obsessive
coverage of narrow topics, along with business
models that reach beyond advertising (including CPA affiliate
links). For
would-be web media giants, one of the most important
quotes in the article came from Sequoia Capital's Michael
Moritz who told the Times, "Perpetual
movement is the essence of survival and prosperity
online. If online media and entertainment companies
don’t improve every day, they will just wind up
as the newfangled version of Reader's Digest
— bankrupt.”
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Elsewhere today, .biz
got a boost when Overstock.com
announced
today that they will be launching a major new
ecommerce site a O.biz
on October 31. The new site will give
individuals and businesses a new place to buy bulk
merchandise at discount prices. The company said
it will initially focus on restaurant, office and
hotel products.
Overstock.com won the
rights to use the rare one-letter .biz domain by
winning Neustar's (the .biz registry)
request for proposal (RFP) competition. Neustar
has also engaged Sedo
to auction off 31 one-letter .biz domains that did
not go through the RFP process later this month.
Those will be sold in a week-long
online auction that will run Sept.
23-30. |
The use of a
.biz domain by a high profile company like Overstock.com
will help increase recognition and, the registry hopes,
adoption of the gTLD that was introduced in 2001 to give
global businesses their own swath of Internet real estate.
The extension has always been overshadowed by the firmly
entrenched .com so it needs to see this kind of
corporate adoption to increase its visibility. The Sedo
auction should also garner attention, especially now that
Overstock has shown a willingness to invest their
resources in a large-scale .biz flagged commercial site.
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