What is the smaller publisher to do in this world of giant page view generators like Buzzfeed and The Daily Mail? What is their business as Medium and others are trying to be the place where one should publish?
Rafat Ali, the founder of Skift a wonderful site for travel industry news, has written a must read about his experience trying to raise money, regaining focus, and just doing what they need to do to succeed titled, “How We Got off the Addiction to Venture Capital and Created Our Own way to profits.” How they stopped chasing scale, focused on building direct channels to their readers versus trying to be a distributed media platform, focused on doing things today that brought revenue today”, worked on their company culture, and strengthened their utility for, and connection to, their readers.
“Lastly, we embraced the idea of being boutique, in the truest sense of that word, and have been loud and proud about it. One of the fallacies of mainstream media coverage of smaller media businesses is that these are just lifestyle passion businesses. Passion about the subject, enough to spend many years of our lives in it, sure. What business engenders loyalties if it doesn’t have passion behind it?”
The post is inspiring and a great blueprint for smaller publishers who want to work in and own a niche. The kind of publishers that I like to work with and believe the web is supposed to enable.