Stop panicking. If you're a reader, chances are your favorite niche Web site isn't going away. It may be updated less frequently than before, because the editorial staff has been reduced from 100 to 10 and the site has merged with its archrival, but it's not gone. (Apologies to fans of Word.com who know that worthy sites do disappear sometimes.)
What is gone, unfortunately, is the hope that such sites will rule the Web. Whether it's Britannica bouncing from a subscription model to an advertising model back to a subscription model or Salon hoping it can postpone delisting by allowing its readers to choose ads or subscriptions, you can see the post-Nasdaq-crash world of online publishing returns to its original question: How do we make money doing this?
The received wisdom is that some such sites - usually covering business, purveying pornography or working on an aggressively low-rent budget - are profitable. But the business Web site cited as a hit trades off the name of the planet's best-known business newspaper, the Wall Street Journal; porn sites deal with a towering level of credit-card hanky-panky; and even one-man-shows such as Matt Drudge and Harry Knowles had to expand their tiny empires to various traditional media to cash in.
Right now there appears to be a race among Web publishers to garner the most revenue in the short term by making the experience of visiting its site intolerable, like the intrusive ads spearheaded by CNET or the Slate format in which text ads sneak into spaces readers expect to find unpaid-for material. The ads will get so overpowering it's no surprise that Salon thinks it might take in some money by eliminating them for its best customers.
If I may borrow one of the many metaphors Web publishers have taken as their own: yes, the Web is like cable television in some ways. The problem, though, is that most readers of the Web have determined that the Salons and Slates of the world are basic-channels, not premium ones. People will pay extra to see the Sopranos; they won't pay to watch talking heads argue on the Fox News Channel. And for most sites asking for visitors' money, the utility and production values they offer are closer to those of the lame Fox News than the Sopranos.
But many sites are worth reading. Bottom-scraping stock prices haven't prevented TheStreet.com's RealMoney.com from remaining a top source for near-real-time market analysis; even when creditors were all but changing the locks on the doors of the APBnews.com offices, its journalists were delivering fine work. How can these sites remain alive in a poisonous advertising environment, during a time when auxiliary ways of taking in cash, from subscriptions to conferences, seem iffy? By banding together and coalescing into a formidable network that can unite all business and technical functions under one roof and letting each site focus on the only thing at which it should excel: produce material people want to read and discuss. Such a model would cut costs dramatically and make it more likely that any revenue found out there might lead to profit some day.
I'm not talking about Time Warner's discredited Pathfinder model, in which the well-known brands got buried behind a nonexistent one. What I propose is a structure in which each entity gets to keep its identity. A variation on this is now being done informally - Plastic.com takes in the work of outside friends like Modern Humorist and the New Republic as well as that of fellow Automatic Media outlets Feed and Suck - but what these sites need is a shared back-end. Microsoft-owned Slate
