There's no such thing as people. There are demographics, and they all have different interests.
I think it's clear there's a huge demographic with no interest in anything beyond celebrity trivia.
There's also a HN demographic, and there may even be some overlap (probably not much...) between both.
The useful question is whether or not there's a demographic willing to support the content you want to create, and if so, how do you find it/them?
There's always been a subculture of niche print/book publishing which squeaks by on a subscription model, and the web hasn't killed that. I keep finding sites that work in that way. So I don't think the web is killing that model.
Obviously Buzzfeed does a lot better, and it's adorable. [tm]
As for monetisation - a lot of personal blogs are there to support a professional portfolio, especially in tech. I'm just fine with that.
But there are also new opportunities. I was talking to someone last week about their teenager, who runs a mini-business on Instagram. She has 300k followers, and people pay her to promote their work.
She's fifteen. The site is an art site. It's not quite super-abstract conceptual gallery art, but it's not low quality cheese either.
All kinds of things are possible now that weren't possible before.
>There's no such thing as people. There are demographics, and they all have different interests.
Ouch! Your comment literally hurt me. I upvoted you anyway, as I think the rest of your comment is excellent.
But I want to address that first line. I know where you're coming from and it is the reality we find ourselves in nowadays. But.
In my opinion, we are at the cusp of having the technology to break that mindset. Demographics are an antiquated way of dealing with the "there are too many people to deal with!" problem, so we put them into buckets. But here's the rub: privacy.
To break the idea of demographics we would have to be even more intrusive on how we track and profile individual users. Or maybe not...
Going back to the original article, maybe it is centralisation that sucks. If I want one place to give me want it thinks I need, or even what I really need, then yes, privacy suffers. But how about if I just have the tools to find what I like, and not have them all under the same umbrella? The way it was a long time ago, where I could be involved in various different communities, and there was no link between them except for my own list of links.
I think it's clear there's a huge demographic with no interest in anything beyond celebrity trivia.
There's also a HN demographic, and there may even be some overlap (probably not much...) between both.
The useful question is whether or not there's a demographic willing to support the content you want to create, and if so, how do you find it/them?
There's always been a subculture of niche print/book publishing which squeaks by on a subscription model, and the web hasn't killed that. I keep finding sites that work in that way. So I don't think the web is killing that model.
Obviously Buzzfeed does a lot better, and it's adorable. [tm]
As for monetisation - a lot of personal blogs are there to support a professional portfolio, especially in tech. I'm just fine with that.
But there are also new opportunities. I was talking to someone last week about their teenager, who runs a mini-business on Instagram. She has 300k followers, and people pay her to promote their work.
She's fifteen. The site is an art site. It's not quite super-abstract conceptual gallery art, but it's not low quality cheese either.
All kinds of things are possible now that weren't possible before.