SEC Country/Land of 10 shutting down June 30

Whoa. Cox had pumped a ton of money/resources into this:

 

Also shutting down Land of 10, the Big Ten site:



Heard the editors got six weeks severance. Not sure about the front-line writers.

 

Gonna make it a lot easier for The Athletic to gain footing if all their competition just folds.

 

That sucks, but I've often wondered about their readership numbers. The articles are usually not very well-written and a lot of times it's just kind of rumor mill, let's get everybody fired up about what Paul Finebaum said about Big 10 kinda stuff.


I just follow them on Facebook. Are both sites a subscription-based service? Or were they trying to make ends meet with digital advertising?

 

No, it was completely free.

 

I took an interview there a couple years ago. Needed a job at the time but it wasn't the right fit. Know a few people there (one of them is getting married on Saturday) and I feel for them because they are good people.

 

They were free. The content mostly seemed like it was designed to get a bunch of anonymous readers bickering in the comments section. And some of that is fine, but if it's mixed with a little news and some features and some more enterprise stuff. It never got there.

 

This also comes a few months after they shut down Rare.us, which was their first digital-only platform. If I remember right, Facebook changing its distribution algorithm got the blame.

I'm betting these websites' traffic took a big hit. I followed the local Land of 10 a bit. The writers did good work, but it wasn't anything better than the big paper... or a number of other websites that have covered the school for well over a decade.

Hope the out-of-work writers find new gigs soon.

 

The FB algorithm was a massive traffic driver for SEC Country in its first year or so. It was where about 75% of their traffic came from.

 

They seemed to build their content model around clickbait headlines, aggregation, and team-oriented ra-ra'ing. Doing that means you will rely a lot on social media audiences stumbling on your stuff rather than building a consistent readership and a plan for organic/SEO traffic. And when the biggest social media platform changes its algorithm to prevent clickbait headlines from surfacing as often, you're going to sink. Even in the age of the internet, the quality of the reader is connected to the quality of the content.

 

Or, serve as further notice that their ground is just as shaky, if not shakier.

 

They had kind of a two/pronged approach.

They started with a powerhouse aggregation mill. Then they brought in beat writers and recruiting writers. Some were not great, but a lot were. It’s really too bad.

Granted, their expansion was super agressive and they were spending enough to do it the “right” way, which is a dangerous game these days.