Eric Smith can pinpoint the precise week when Providence Daily Dose, the irreverent local blog he co-founded in September 2007, vaulted to prominence.
It began on Dec. 13 of that year, within months of the site’s launch, with the now-notorious snowstorm that stymied officials, snarled traffic and stranded schoolchildren on buses for hours. The site’s traffic grew throughout the day as readers sent in reports about the growing chaos caused by the storm.
The site’s first burst of notoriety ended a week later when The Providence Journal published a 1,100-word profile. Readership doubled overnight at Daily Dose, which is geared to the city’s 20- and 30-somethings and modeled on sites like Gawker and Gothamist LLC’s stable of urban blogs.
“There was nothing like us at the time in Providence – there still really isn’t,” said Smith, 33, an art therapist by day who is one of the site’s four co-founders and editors. “We kind of expected there to be more right now. We were even surprised it didn’t exist before.”
With traditional media outlets like newspapers and television stations shedding staff, attention is turning to online publications and the growing role they are expected to play in the local news and information ecosystem. But do they have a viable business model?
For a number of prominent local bloggers, the answer right now is no – although that could change. With their traffic growing, some Rhode Island bloggers are looking at boosting their revenue and expanding their missions.
The local blog with the most advanced business model is Rhode Island’s Future, the liberal political site founded in 2005 that is the Ocean State’s answer to Daily Kos. The site was bought last fall by Patrick Crowley, an assistant executive director at the National Education Association union’s state chapter.
Crowley, 36, said buying the site – which averages 3,500 unique visitors and more than 6,000 hits a day – was as much a political decision as a business one. “I was confident at the very least I would break even” based on projected revenue, he said. “More importantly … as an activist blog, it’s my goal to use what revenue is generated by it to actually further some of the causes that I believe in.”
He wouldn’t say what he paid for the site, but overhead is low – just a domain name and server space. It has no paid employees at present, but Crowley hopes to pay a stipend to a summer intern this year and someday hire a full-time writer.
Ads are also sold on the site’s RSS syndication feed, and Crowley plans to place ads on individual blog posts in the future. RIFuture could also benefit from its readership, which is heavy on political insiders whom advertisers may want to reach. But, Crowley said, “I’m not expecting big money.”
With revenue from national display ads running at pennies per page view, the profitability of regional blogs may depend in part on the extent to which local businesses embrace digital marketing. Online advertising spending by small businesses is projected to more than double over the next five years to $32.1 billion in 2013, according to the Chantilly, Va.-based research firm Kelsey Group.
Like other blogs, RIFuture defines itself in part by what it is not, which is traditional journalism of the newspaper and TV variety. “I really see the role of Rhode Island’s Future as a check on the influence of The [Providence] Journal,” Crowley said, though he also says the state’s major news organizations continue to play an important role.
“Whatever it is that I’m doing, it really isn’t journalism at a certain level,” Crowley said. “I’m doing citizen reporting and activist antagonizing in a lot of the work that I’m doing.”
RIFuture’s counterpart on the right is Anchor Rising, founded shortly after the 2004 elections as a platform for conservatives in the state. The site gets about 2,000 visits a day, which includes multiple visits by the same person at different points in the day, said Justin Katz, 34, a professional carpenter who is Anchor Rising’s administrator and one of its six regular contributors.
The business side of Anchor Rising is not as far along as that of RIFuture, although Katz said “we’ve recently started thinking of it more in terms of like a hypothetical – if this were a business, what would we have to do?” Unlike Crowley, Katz could easily imagine himself writing full time. “It wouldn’t take that much to make this a full-time job,” he said. “I’m not asking for a million-dollar endowment.”
And he hopes that traditional media, which provides much of the basis for Anchor Rising’s commentary, finds a way to survive. “Society has to come up with some solution,” he said.
For Providence Daily Dose, the present business challenge is not selling ads – it’s finding people to sell them. The site is trying to put together a sales team to sell ads on commission, but has had no luck so far. Still, Smith doesn’t doubt that the market exists.
“Our rates are reasonably low compared to our readership,” he said, with a minimum ad purchase requirement of $100. “I think people would be getting a bargain for advertising with us compared to The Phoenix.”
He added: “I think that the model works – I just think we haven’t had an opportunity to really test it yet. But I think it works and we absolutely want to be the biggest name in town for the kind of thing that we are.”
At Greater City: Providence, a blog that focuses on development issues and the cityscape, the three founders have begun discussing ways to monetize the site, which co-owner Jef Nickerson, 35, said gets 300 visitors on a good day. The site does not have a tax status yet, but he imagines it would work best as a nonprofit, describing his vision for it as closer to a think tank than a newspaper.
Nickerson, who works in the security department at the Rhode Island School of Design, also thinks Providence, with its small size and creative population, is the perfect place for experimentation with new media models – including local online-only news outlets that pay reporters. “There needs to be a technological way to make that happen, and a design way and a creative way,” he said.
Attempts are being made to bring a local newspaper-like model to the Internet. In March, retired advertising executive Chuck Newton launched My02818.com, a hyperlocal site that offers original reporting and content about East Greenwich. He said the town is a good fit because of its affluent, tech-savvy population and the lack of other in-depth coverage of the town. •
