Those of us that live in the culturally rich and diverse inner northern suburbs of Melbourne are spoiled for choice with retro and vintage clothing, independent music shops, vegetarian and vegan cafes, quirky art galleries and live music venues.
A number of businesses publish guides to draw attention to the latest, the best and the most interesting places to eat, drink, dress, party and play. In this post I will be reviewing the reviewers. It’s not my aim to criticise these sites but to investigate their missions and business models, and to hypothesise about their viability. The four sites reviewed below at Breakfast Out, Norfguide, Lost magazine and Three Thousand.
Disclaimers: I have no financial interests in any of these sites. I have corresponded with some of their owners by email, but have not met any if them face to face. I also publish local news sites that could be considered competitors to these guides. These local news site aggregate and syndicate posts about local cafes, businesses, arts, events and experiences.
http://breakfastout.com.au
Mission: to publish reviews of breakfasts at Melbourne cafes.
Design: the site features a basic graphic design.
Content: the site divides Melbourne into five main areas (CBD, north, south, east and west) and contains reviews of cafes in those areas.
Frequency: occasional.
Platform: the site is static with little metadata. Articles feature ‘search tags’ that cross reference articles to each other, but the tags are not included in the index and are of little use in browsing the site. The five geographical areas form the main navigation of the site but do not feature in the metadata structure.
Feeds: no RSS feed link is offered on the page but if you read the source code for the home page, they do have one courtesy of whatever site builder or content management system they use, so you can subscribe to their RSS feed. Tag feeds are not available.
Print version: no.
Business model: banner advertising.
Strength: the site covers a diverse range of venues and reviews places that are not getting a lot of attention from local bloggers.
Weakness: the site does not publish very often, less often in fact than many blogs.
http://norfguide.com.au
Mission: to publish reviews of shops, business, cafes etc in the inner north of Melbourne in print and online.
Design: features a sophisticated graphic design.
Content: the site features some well designed and integrated mapping of the places it reviews. It divides the inner north of Melbourne into five areas: North Melbourne and Carlton; Fitzroy, Collingwood and Abbotsford; North Fitzroy and Clifton Hill; North Carlton and Brunswick; and Northcote and Westgarth. Many parts of the site, such as events, remain empty.
Frequency: occasional (based on the print guides).
Platform: the site is static with no obvious metadata.
Feeds: there are no RSS feeds.
Print version: the site mirrors the content of print guides distributed in cafes and shops in the target area.
Business model: businesses pay for listings in the print guide and get placed on the website as part of the deal, so it’s basically display advertising. The site itself contains no banner ads.
Strength: the quality of the graphic design. The integration of online maps.
Weakness: will never be comprehensive because businesses must pay to be included. Website is incomplete.
http://www.lostmagazine.com.au
Mission: to publish a print guide to Fitzroy, focusing primarily on Brunswick St.
Design: fairly simple print graphic design.
Content: a mix of original research based content about Brunswick St, with cafe listings and display advertising.
Frequency: vol 1 of a print guide to Brunswick St and surrounds in Fitzroy launched at the beginning of the year. I have not seen any further editions.
Platform: a badly designed frames based static site allows you to flick through .jpg images of the pages of the print edition. You can also download the whole edition as a .pdf. The articles are not published in text form, so there’s little content for Google to index.
Feeds: none.
Print version: the print version came first, and the online version is simply a copy of the print version.
Business model: display advertising in the print version and banner advertising online.
Strength: original research has created unique content.
Weakness: website.
http://www.threethousand.com.au
Mission: to publish a guide to Melbourne’s youth subculture, with features on art, music, food and events.
Design: a sophisticated graphic design.
Content: a combination of event listings, such as the opening of a new bar or gig details for a band, to fashion shows and reviews of books and DVDs.
Frequency: the site is updated regularly, with content grouped into weekly issues. Each issue contains six posts so the site is updated nearly every day.
Platform: static site, probably CMS based. Good metadata structure, with posts tagged by suburb, genre (music, film, etc), and abstract concepts like ‘ambience’. This is good for browsing and random discovery.
Feeds: RSS feed for all content only; feeds for individual tags are not available.
Print version: No. There is also an email newsletter version.
Business model: banner advertising in the site and the email newsletter and promoting products and events.
Strength: consistency, longevity and diversity of content.
Weakness: does not publish enough. It could and should add multiple posts per day.
Change
The delivery of information is a service that commercial media companies succeeded in developing into a business by managing a scarcity of information and by exercising a substantial or monopoly control over its dissemination. Information used to be expensive to produce, and was mainly done by people with access to the means of distribution (journalists, writers and photographers who worked for publishers).
Before the digital revolution, there was no point going to the effort and expense of creating something that would not be published. Now, information costs almost nothing to produce (apart from time and effort) and almost nothing to publish. The commercial media no longer controls dissemination of content. Anyone can publish anything and this provides a huge incentive to create content.
The result is an abundance of content, which has destroyed the commercial value of information. The commercial value of many forms of content, such as restaurant reviews, has crashed to almost nothing, while the intrinsic value of that content remains high for its consumers.
Crisis
The commercial media no longer controls a scarcity of content, and is being overwhelmed with competition for audience attention from citizen journalists and user generated, social media content. Consumption of commercial print media products is crashing and print advertising is crashing along with it.
Audiences are fragmenting and obtaining information relevant to them in new ways and from new (and existing) providers. Online advertising is despised and ignored by audiences, and has little chance to generate significant revenue. The advertising supported publishing business model is effectively dead in the online world.
Advice
I don’t want to simply dismiss all these sites, but I have serious doubts about their financial viability and potential for success. It may depend how this success is measured. If success is earning enough advertising income to support paid staff, I doubt any site will succeed. As print advertising continues to collapse and online advertising fails to replace it in revenue terms, I believe that all publishers relying on advertising based business models will fail.
There’s lots of naive enthusiam for building something that is pleasurable to consume and useful to the community. However, it is by no means obvious that a for profit business is the most appropriate or efficient structure to use to achieve this goal. In fact, analysis of the economics of content and the viability of the advertising business model reveals that commercial businesses will most likely fail to make these ideas work.
I’d advise the publishers of these sites not to invest too much money into their production; to automate what they can and to move towards being inclusive and cooperative rather than exclusive and separate. This means providing content in ways that audiences want it: thoroughly sorted, tagged and indexed for easy scanning, with email newsletter and feed subscription options. Content should be localised and mapped.
Revolution
Information wants to be free. The means to achieve this objective have now been created. The industrial conditions that enabled corporations to convert the service of information dissemination into a business have disappeared. Game over. End of story. It really is that simple.
I have demonstrated through the local news sites I have published that a team of local bloggers can work together to publish sites that far exceed the content on these commercial guide sites. Business cannot compete with equally skilled and experienced people who give their product away for free.
The suits need to realise that their era is over: commercial media is dead. There is no business model. There is no need for businesses to act as gatekeepers between content creators and content consumers. We don’t need you, or want you, any more. Go away.
Future
I am now tracking over 200 Melbourne blogs and am publishing six local news sites of their aggregated content. There’s no advertising to spoil the reading experience and no exploitation of the contributors. In fact, by syndicating blog content, the local news sites provide links back to the blogs, which helps build Google relevance and rank and drives traffic to the blogs.
The Central Melbourne site now has over 50 contributors and over 650 posts. The Fitzroy site now has over 50 contributors and over 550 posts. The others are all growing steadily. Over 100 blogs and sites have content that is at least partially tagged by suburb.
This is just the beginning: these sites exist mainly to demonstrate the technical potential of the manually curated and automatically syndicated publishing model and social potential of the cooperative, non-commercial non-business model.
I hypothesis that within five years, most suburbs will have local news sites run by enthusiastic volunteers, and sites like these will be a primary communication strategy used by local governments and other not for profit community organisations.
Goodbye media business, hello media community. We are the media now.
30 April 2009 at 10:33 am
hi brian! thanks! I was wondering about norfguide and what its deal was, the content is really disappointing and bland. the design is nice. I’ll be definately checking out the breakfast blog! woohoo! threethousand is always a good source.
Carla
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30 April 2009 at 11:12 am
It’s good to hear this review is useful. As one of the audience I am always disppointed when the requirements of the business model actively undermine and compromise the quality of the content, which results in a negative consumer experience. I maintain that with products like these a good audience experience and profit are mutually exclusive.
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18 July 2009 at 2:43 pm
Hi, saw this linked on Twitter. Pretty naive post. Three thousand pays all their writers and editors. They earn money from advertising. I’ve been getting their email for three years and its always been minimum 8 posts a week plus at least 10 sometimes 20 event write-ups. They have made (in your words) “the service of information dissemination into a business.” I would much rather read well written articles by them with actual insider news, than your local news site with feeds from crap, unpaid bloggers. Imagine if they were “inclusive and cooperative” like you say. they’d have heaps more content, which in my opinion they don’t need, and the writing would be bloody terrible. I don’t buy your theory.
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18 July 2009 at 4:01 pm
Your view that bloggers are crap because they are not paid to write their blogs is naive. Many are written by professional writers who work in academe, marketing, journalism, television, theatre, etc. My point is that the views of many people conveniently aggregated into local news sites will soon exceed the quantity and utility of information provided by commercial guides. The relative quality is for readers to judge.
My theory is a theory – I’ll revisit it in five years time and see how good it was then. In the meantime, consider the fact that the Lost guide has folded, Norf is still saying it’s 2nd edition is ‘coming soon’ about 9 months after the first and Breakfast Out last published a review about two months ago. Only the first guide in this space, Three Thousand, survives.
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18 July 2009 at 4:17 pm
But they are crap. i have looked through your feeds and the writing is terrible. I’m suggesting you’re wrong when you say this commercial media business model is dead. 3000 is making money, paying everyone and i much prefer what they write and how its delivered. your point is that the commercial value of information has reduced, my point is that the commercial value of good writing, good TASTE and information filtering has not reduced – your feeds don’t offer that. Not the way I want it.
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18 July 2009 at 4:26 pm
I have no idea if Three Thousand is profitable. Do you? As far as I know it is one of many projects produced by a commecial agency that also does work for the state government and other clients. Three Thousand may be a high profile project that built the agency’s reputation, but whether it is profitable as a stand-alone product is different. I’m not making any assumptions about it.
The writing abilities of local bloggers vary considerably. The local news sites contain diverse content of variable quality. To say it is all the same – bad – is simply incorrect. Your opinion that you don’t like it is fine – so don’t read local bloggers then. Judgements about good writing are subjective and will differ from one reader to another.
In a future post I will be discussing the quality / quantity issue. I believe the 180+ contributors to the local news sites provide a far more diverse and insightful view of Melbourne that the few people writing for and publishing these existing guides.
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18 July 2009 at 4:37 pm
As far as i know they charge per subscriber, a list bigger than 15,000 and have a range of prety good advertisers. i think there are a lot of people like me, who want a trusted, well written source of info, not a crowd sourcing opportunity and thats why the market for things like 3000 is growing. the difference between feed and online guide is: feed has no curator. Good taste is worth money. That’s why i think your theory is wrong.
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18 July 2009 at 4:52 pm
We can disgree on the quality of blog writing indefinitely. You are wrong in thinking that the local news sites are not curated. They are – by me. I choose which feeds get included and can then moderate them down to individual posts. I can’t change what is in them but I determine whether they are included or not.
I suggest that your preference for a consistent commercial voice is due to years of experience at consuming this kind of media. You are suspicious of social media because it is unpredictable and inconsistent, but this does not make it unreliable or worthless. Again, good taste is subjective.
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18 July 2009 at 6:46 pm
i think you are wrong describing 3000 as commercial voice. They have writers who come from all around the community, chosen for their intrests and paid for good writing. i read your blog and it seems to me like your determined to hate any media thats funded by ads, and in this post your trying to do this by saying the business model is redundant. but it’s clearly not.
I need a beter argument from you to stay interested in this social media theory of yours. why do you really hate 3000 and these other guides? there seems to be something else going on. and whats wrong with thinking about writing as a trade? A job, you know. i am glad that there are business models that alow people to get paid for writing good stuff, where finite funds lead to quality output, and where people have to think carefully about what is published. do you really want to live in a world where writing is not rewarded as a specialized skill? imagine, no objective analasis, no accountability and endless updates on ‘look at this piece of graffiti’ and ‘oooh the staff were mean to me at the cafe’. Aaaararrrrghghghg!
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18 July 2009 at 6:59 pm
My definition of a commercial publication is one that has a business model (in this case advertising), has income, has paid staff and has a consistent editorial voice. Thus Three Thousand is a commercial publication.
I’m not alone in saying the advertising business model is fragile and in danger of collapsing. For more on this read Mumbrella or other media business critiques.
I don’t hate Three Thousand in general. When it started it was innovative, but in terms of technology and strategy it is now stagnant and out of date. I came to hate it recently when it breached my copyright then resolutely failed to take responsibility for its actions. I hate unethical greedy lazy lying behaviour. I don’t hate the other guides, I think they have a poor business model and don’t provide much service to their audiences.
You are making some assumptions about what I am saying that are not supported by what I have written. There is nothing wrong with writing as a trade; I am a professional writer, editor and publisher. I need a better argument from you to make further responses worthwhile. By the way, it’s meant to be ‘you’re’ in several places in your comment.
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18 July 2009 at 7:07 pm
i never said i was a good writer! i said i like reading good writing – probably because i am not good at it myself. i followed your 3000 image blow-up thing, and it’s pretty clear you hated them before that happened. how full on was your reaction? i thought they were pretty nice considering. I guess your kneejerk rage and violent words about it made me sucpicious there was some other reason you hated them, that’s all. if them being ‘up to date’ means incorporating user generated content, i will be the first to unsubscribe, i’m glad they have stuck to there guns and i’m glad its working for them. i’ll keep reading your crazy blog to see if you make any real points about the rise of social media, thanks for this discussion.
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18 July 2009 at 7:37 pm
I never suggested that Three Thousand should incorporate user generated content. Your ideas about what I am saying seem to be coming from your own imagination rather than my writing.
You evidently don’t understand the copyright issue at the core of my post about Three Thousand or the significance of a commercial business failing in its risk management in allowing the situation to escalate by making petty excuses and not admitting to their behaviour, apologising for it and moving on constructively.
Finally, a writer with poor spelling, punctuation and expression may find it difficult to be convincing as a discerning critic of good writing.
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18 July 2009 at 10:51 pm
Ah Brian: your online persona always goes the extra mile.
I think rowan protested too much, as I went and had a look at 3000, and it’s not exactly the New Yorker, now is it?
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19 July 2009 at 12:07 am
Lord, why do you test me thus? You send me idiots who can’t write and who proclaim themselves judges of good writing, and yet I cannot smite them. Oh the irony…
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19 July 2009 at 5:02 pm
hehee! at least their site is funny and makes me laugh, yours is just funny peculiar, as my mum would say. Anyway, so dude, first of all, you ARE suggesting that user generated content will eventually sink these other business models, right? which implies the only way theyll survive is to change their model. And I’m saying the opposite – that’s what we’re arguing about man. I’m not imagining it.
now you’ve got me intriugued with this other post, i went back through it all and didn’t they admit, apologise, change stuff? it’s all there in the post. Hey brian, so do you have many friends? maybe we could be friends. (as long as you don’t smite me – that would be UNcool.) also, Betty, I looked at your site and you rule.
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19 July 2009 at 7:32 pm
No, I’m not suggesting that UGC will beat commercial sites as such. The reality is that people of equal talent write content for both kinds of site (and many like me do work for commercial sites by day and do our own sites at night). My point is more about the business model. If so many people are willing to give away good content, then the commercial value of content falls, although its intrinsic value remains high (in other words it is still very useful).
With fewer visitors to any single site (because there are so many options) advertisers will find less return on advertising on any one site and that site will earn little advertising income. Without a stable business model, it will collapse and close.
Bloggers will continue to publish because they are motivated by the accomplishment of doing so and by the influence they build through engagement with their audience.
With new guide sites like The Real Melbourne offering free advertising, the cost to advertise anywhere will crash as sites compete to offer lower and lower rates. This again leads to a collapse of the business model.
UGC will not beat commercial sites as such. Commercial sites will collapse and UGC will prevail by default. UGC is simply more efficient.
Obviously I have to make it really simple for you. Three Thousand did not openly acknowledge that what they did was wrong and never actually apologised for it, just whinged and made excuses. I contacted them first to give them an opportunity to fix it before I published a story about it and they were too indifferent to even take down my number and my message.
I like my friends to use apostrophes correctly.
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19 July 2009 at 5:37 pm
Ouch. Q.E.D. Again.
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20 July 2009 at 7:30 am
You’re being (see- apostrophe!) pretty mean, dude. Based on your predictions, I hope you and me have two different future ahead of us – and mine is a NOT a future where The Real Melbourne posts are all I have to read because advertisers can’t tell difference between crap and good content. Meanwhile, here is a taste of your future, cortesy The Real Melbourne: “Croft Institute, Madame Brussells, the now-departed St Jerome, 1806 – all wonderful places to take your personality and reflect it in a new ambiance.” Blleleeerrrrrchhh!
Also, whatever you say about that 3000 thing – looks like their story just different to yours. I will choose who to believe.
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