Melbourne’s online local media is a dynamic environment where many new media experiments are being made. For the casual reader, it seems that new guide sites launch regularly, providing new content to consume. For casual content creators, there are increasing opportunities to contribute to new collaborative projects as volunteer writers. If you’re not ready to commit to publishing your own site or blog but want to publish occasionally, sites are asking for contributions.
This post will examine some new and existing online guides to Melbourne that have no print version. It’s purpose is to explore emerging local content business models and how local news services local audiences. My previous discussion of local guides and the future of local media focused on guides with old school distribution models: print guides and online guides with a static or issue based publishing schedule, rather than the continual publishing schedule made possible online.
It is the sixth post in a series about the development of community based and locally oriented social media in Melbourne. Previous posts have provided advice on online marketing strategies for Melbourne arts events and reviewed Melbourne traders association websites.
www.therealmelbourne.com.au/wp/ – The Real Melbourne
Description:
- The Real Melbourne says that it ‘isn’t Melbourne for tourists – it’s Melbourne for locals, and by locals.’ It features reviews of bars and restaurants and of cultural events like film, music and the arts.
Business model:
- Advertising. They were offering free advertising in July 2009 to attract new clients.
Strengths:
- Uses WordPress.
- Reviews some places that have received little or no attention from bloggers, thus creating unique content of value to the audience.
- Was split off from Macabre Melbourne to better define its focus.
Weaknesses:
- WordPress categories are used to define venue types (restaurant, cafe, etc) but these are only displayed on the homepage, not in the side menu. This results in a poor navigation experience.
- Tags are used for individual names, streets and suburbs but in an inconsistent way. Tags are not displayed in posts and only feature in a tag cloud in the footer. This undermines their functionality, which should be to help people find other content on the site that interests them.
- It uses WordPress and has a full content feed (obscurely located in the footer) and is enabled for category and tag feeds, but these are not promoted anywhere. This is another lost opportunity at increasing content findability.
- Generally not using the power and flexibility of the WordPress CMS.
- Does not seem to be actively or openly recruiting new contributors.
Prediction:
- The Real Melbourne is new and will take time to grow.
- It must increase its publishing schedule and learn to exploit its CMS if it wishes to avoid the fate of Breakfast Out (not publishing enough content to keep audiences interested and making the content difficult to find).
lanewaymagazine.com.au – Laneway magazine
Description:
- A review site focusing on the Melbourne CBD.
Business model:
- Advertising.
Strengths:
- Uses WordPress.
- Offers feeds of each contributor’s posts, which is a clever use of WordPress’ flexibility.
- Openly recruiting new contributors.
Weaknesses:
- Poor use of WordPress categories.
- Has a full content feed (obscurely located in the footer) and is enabled for category and tag feeds, but these are not promoted anywhere. This is another lost opportunity at increasing content findability.
- Generally not using the power and flexibility of the WordPress CMS.
Prediction:
- Has been live for a year and has not built a critical mass of content.
- It faces increased competition from the other guides analysed here and does not appear to have a unique voice or a focus on publishing unique content.
- It will fail or merge with other sites.
melbinnoir.com.au/wordpress – Melbinnoir
Description:
- Looks like it is designed to be a guide to live music, particularly jazz, in Melbourne.
Business model:
- Advertising.
Strengths:
- Uses WordPress.
- There is a niche for a comprehensive music guide in Melbourne waiting to be filled by a site like this.
Weaknesses:
- Either in early stages of development or already abandoned.
- Very little content.
- Does not tell you who runs it.
- Uses the same WordPress template as The Real Melbourne and looks too similar to it.
Prediction:
- Deadpool.
www.bitemelbourne.com – Bite Melbourne
Description:
- Advertising free WordPress site as front end for an iPhone app containing Melbourne restaurant reviews.
Business model:
- subscription.
Strengths:
- Uses WordPress.
- Designed for the Gen Y must-have iPhone.
- Coherent and transparent business model.
- Actively recruiting contributors.
- Authors will be paid.
- Not reliant on weak advertising business model.
Weaknesses:
- Is new and will take time to grow.
Prediction:
- Sufficient early promise to continue with the project.
- Could lead to independent success or become attractive to a commercial buy-out.
http://undergroundmelbourne.wordpress.com – Underground Melbourne
Description:
- Describes itself as a ‘homage to the hidden corners and less-traversed beauties of Melbourne. Covering food, shopping, architecture, subcultures, events and whatever other small pockets of oddity seem endearing and exciting.’
Business model:
- None.
Strengths:
- Uses WordPress.
- There is a niche for a guide to quirky and unusual things that would not be covered in other guides.
Weaknesses:
- Rarely updated.
- Does not tell you who runs it.
Prediction:
- It has been around for about 18 months and has not developed into a useful resource. Deadpool.
macabremelbourne.com – Macabre Melbourne
Description:
- Says that it ‘looks for the latest and greatest in terms of art, culture, fashion, film and music to hit the streets of the 3000′.
Business model:
- Advertising.
Strengths:
- Uses WordPress.
- There is a niche for a guide that covers things other than food and drink (the content that was split off from this site and made into The Real Melbourne).
Weaknesses:
- In early stages of development.
- Very little content.
- Messy unstructured site that is confusing to navigate.
Prediction:
- Deadpool.
Analysis
For many readers, there are two content aggregators of choice: a feed reader and Google. You read feeds of sites you like in a feed reader, which enables you to browse a lot of content. Alternatively, if you want to find something more specific, you search for it.You don’t visit a site hoping to find something of interest. You don’t need to read online in the limited way you read a newspaper, scanning the pages for articles that interest you.
Audiences increasingly want to consume content in formats convenient to them, and visiting a ‘destination’ site is usually not convenient or sufficiently compelling to make the commitment worthwhile. I believe that sites that view themselves as destinations rather than platforms that export content to audiences are doomed to failure.
Alone, each of these sites will publish a small amount of content that will never build into a critical mass that draws regular audience attention. Alone, each of these commercial sites (excluding Underground Melbourne, which is non-commercial) will earn a small amount of advertising income and will struggle to make any real money: certainly nothing to make editing them an adequately paid role.
Perhaps together, Melbinnoir, Underground Melbourne, Laneway magazine and Macabre Melbourne could form a critical mass of content sufficient to become a ‘destination’ site, but even then I doubt it without fundamental changes to its publishing strategy.
Bite Melbourne has an entirely different business model based on subscription (purchasing an iPhone app). I’d give it a chance of succeeding. In comparison, The Real Melbourne will never challenge the hundreds of food bloggers in Melbourne. The audience remains fragmented, with readers following multiple food blogs in their feed readers or via the 10 local news sites in inner-city Melbourne.
Generic review sites usually miss the point about how online media helps real people achieve their goals in the real world. We’re tribal. Place matters. Many people do most of their shopping, eating and entertaining relatively close to home. We need more depth of content and knowledge about the immediate world around us, not greater breadth of content about places that we’re unlikely to visit regularly.
Discussion
I don’t expect you to agree with me. I’d really like to be proven wrong. I’d like there to be an online business model that works, but for the moment I don’t believe one exists. With a multitude of amazing non-commercial blogs to read, why would anyone want to read a generic guide site filled with irrelevant advertising?
I mean no disrespect to the people publishing these sites. They’re obviously more optimistic than I am, and I wish them luck.
Instead of immediately criticising my opinion because you disagree with it or you are scared by its implications for your own commercial ambitions, please take the time to develop a reasoned response.
6 August 2009 at 4:19 pm
What about That’s Melbourne – one of the biggest, I think? http://www.thatsmelbourne.com.au
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6 August 2009 at 4:52 pm
Basically if a site has an antiquated platform (ie no CMS), and cannot deliver dynamic content via RSS etc, then I’m not interested. Unless content from sites like this appears in Google search results, I never see it. And as it seems to have no SEO treatment, I never find its content through searches.
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6 August 2009 at 5:37 pm
As someone who runs a melbourne specific blog, how do you find the demand for local (Melbourne specific as opposed to suburb specific) content?
I tend to focus on australia when I write local stuff but I might start to shift towards melbourne seeing as I live here and can get about.
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6 August 2009 at 6:40 pm
It really depends what the content is. Content and audiences are diverse. The ease with which audiences can filter information to suit their needs and interests is what is important.
The more the information is a call to action, such as a promo for an event or a review that makes you want to eat at a restaurant, the more it matters where it is, and that the location is relevant to the reader. I rarely read restaurant reviews for suburbs I never visit.
For the carless inner city tribe I belong to, who are also the audience I am writing and curating content for, location is very important as we primarily visit places we can walk, cycle and tram to. So ‘inner city Melbourne’ and ‘suburban Melbourne’ are two very different things.
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6 August 2009 at 9:17 pm
Critique all you will, but I think the ‘deadpool’ tag is a bit crass. You’re not privvy to the some of the circumstances (work, life issues) that may effect the running of things – especially if the site is run on the smell of an oily rag and the gaps between other gigs.
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6 August 2009 at 11:28 pm
Deadpool is the term used by Techcrunch to announce sites that are shutting down. I don’t doubt what you say, but I publish two posts a day as a hobby with no intentions of monetising my content (and I work full time elsewhere). So I extrapolate from that to suggest that a commercial site needs to publish more content and get more traffic than I do to make the business model work. It’s only my opinion and I keep asking people to prove me wrong…
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8 August 2009 at 1:35 pm
I’m curious as to why is using WordPress a strength? The platform should be irrelevant to the users of the site.
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8 August 2009 at 1:40 pm
It should be irrelevant to the user, but given the relative functionality and flexibility of WordPress compared to other content management systems, then the added functions it enables publishers to deliver to audiences makes the choice of platform very important. So sites that use basic Joomla or Drupal installations without attention to RSS implementation fail to offer the flexibility and convenience audiences are coming to expect.
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8 August 2009 at 3:58 pm
Out of interest Brian what percentage of you readers use feeds? I’ve never used them and I always assumed it was only people who read a lot of blogs who would go to the trouble. You seem to place a lot of importance on them, is that personal or do a lot of people use feeds?
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9 August 2009 at 12:29 am
I estimate about 75% of my traffic comes from people reading my content via feeds rather than visiting the site. As I use WordPress and offer feeds for categories and tags, people can subscribe to the content that specifically interests them, eg ‘Fitzroy’, ‘food’ or ‘street art’, and ignore the rest of what I publish. I think this is a very powerful and important feature to offer. I currently have over 1200 feed subscribers and average about 2000 hits a day. Most users subscribe to the whole feed, but some subscribe also to the full comment feed. Some only subscribe to the ‘breakfast’ feed.
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2 December 2009 at 4:19 pm
Hey Brian,
I missed this when it first came out, and I think you’re right about many of the points you’ve raised. From my own experience, a lot of the administration of TRM (and erven the site build) has been an exeercise in evolution, rather than launching a great product at the start. it’s the reason we aren’t charging for advertising – while we’re changing the product, we don’t expect advertisers to get consistent results.
The only place I’d disagree with your analysis is in citing the absence of an ‘open door’ poicy for new reviews as a weakness. If a website is to achieve ‘critical mass’ around content, it’s not going to be because of exhaustive reams of content in multiple voices. readers connect with the style and personality of particular writers, so openly sourcing random contributors adds to the administrative time in reviewing and sub-editing submitted articles. For people who are happy to write multiple reviews, it’s often easier to write ffrom an established perspective and review more often than to change other people’s submissions to match the site’s brand.
Otherwise, some good advice for those of us running these hobby sites.
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2 December 2009 at 5:46 pm
Thanks Jared, some good points but I have to disagree on the issue of writers. I’m so used to reading work by 20 different people a day via feeds now that the writer really does not matter so much as long as the content is relevant and coherent. I’d suggest that the style or voice of a site is more important than the voice of a single author.
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