Small Publishers Staying Strong

June 26th, 2006 by Chris

Andrew Johnson posted on his blog that he thinks small publishers will be out of business in 2 years. I don’t think so, not even remotely. The small publisher has an inherent value that no large publisher can match. No or little overhead. To be out of business you’d have to be losing money on the business. Bandwidth & hostings costs are only going to decrease, so the main expense with running a content site will only decrease. All you need to do is make a profit, and a profit is easy to make.

Yes, more publishers are entering this field all the time. Yes this has created much more competition. However the Internet is also getting used more and more all the time, so the audience is also growing.

The publishers of today also have the advantage of being here first. The more years a site has been online the harder it is to challenge that site because that site will have accumulated links, bookmarks, regular visitors, etc.

Just look at the plight of the new comers trying to get listed in Google, they are having an extremely difficult time even getting listed whereas 5 year old sites easily enjoy top rankings.

Will Durant said: A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within. This concept is applicable for websites as well. For instance many people have written that Google will never fall from the top of the search engine pile even if a competitor makes a better search engine. So long as Google does not fall in relevancy people will keep using it. Of course it also applies to smaller websites. A large popular content site will not fall unless the management first makes unpopular changes.

The epitome of this concept of course is a forum. A large popular forum is like a juggernaut that will never stop unless the industry it covers suddenly vanishes and the forum doesn’t have time to adapt, or if the management makes poor decisions that alienate the users.

I do see the potential that publishers new to the industry will be discouraged and might give up, that would be their fault though. Certainly all the wannabe professional bloggers out there might find its harder to make a living doing it than they thought. However I do not think an established publisher has much to worry about from the future.

Of course, planning for longevity is important, which is why I wrote an article about it.

No related posts.

Posted in: General »  by: Chris

3 Responses to “Small Publishers Staying Strong”

  1. Peter  Says:
    June 26th, 2006 at 3:47 pm

    I think he’s right concerning lower quality sites. He did mention mediocrity I think. For the same reasons I think you’re wise to make a major push with the quality sites.

  2. Andrew Johnson  Says:
    June 26th, 2006 at 4:46 pm

    Thats what I meant Peter, the higher quality the competition gets the tougher it will be for mediocre sites to get links let alone SE rankings. Outside investment in to content could compound that problem. What was once the domain parking industry is even making moves towards the development side.

    One particular niche I am in right now has a bunch of spam. I suspect the guys behind this are making a very healthy profit. The problem for them is once their free search engine traffic dries up their business model is dead. Not saying that there is anything wrong with that.. just that the people who are taking that approach should either be pocketing their profits or building a site or two for the long term.

  3. Chromate  Says:
    June 27th, 2006 at 5:38 am

    Yeah, I think this is a case of crossed wires. I don’t think Andrew was saying all small publishers will be out of business in 2 years – only those that don’t stay competitive.

    I think that’s true. Things will get harder. I still find it hard to understand why web developers spend all their time developing sites for other people when they could be developing sites for themselves.

    Having said that I don’t think the growth rate will be quite so fast that in 2 years a LOT of people will start going of our business. Publishing successful sites is not easy to do even now and it will only get harder. Those without the determination and, more importantly, the patience to succeed will probably just give up before they pose any threat.

    I think the pure website publishing industry has already seen its peak growth rate over the last 4 years or so. I think things are actually slowing down now due to increased competition and dodgy search engine algorithms. In 2 years you’ll still be able to make a success of things – it’ll just be that much harder due to established sites.

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