Sporting News/AOL Fanhouse

Joe:

The Sporting News doesn't want the Fanhouse employees; it just wants the Fanhouse traffic. That's why you do the deal if you are the Sporting News. Numbers: Sportingnews.com reaches 2.9 million people a month, according to Comscore, which tracks these things. Fanhouse? Just under 10 million.

No disrepect intended, but it isn't the great content that results in nearly 10 million visitors to Fanhouse. Rather, it's AOL's ability to drive traffic to anything. And even with that ability to drive traffic Fanhouse lags way behind Yahoo Sports which averages more than 50 million visitors a month.

Clearly the content on Fanhouse is on par with the content on Yahoo, yet the two sites aren't even in the same league with regard to audience. There is more to it than having great writers and editors turning out super stories. Yahoo and CBSsports.com generate huge traffic from fantasy sports stuff, and it spills over into the pure content side.

There is so much stuff to choose from on the Internet that written editorial content simply isn't enough. My guess is that the Sporting News/Fanhouse traffic won't suffer a bit once the integration is completed and 5 or 6 Fanhouse columnists move over.

 

TechCrunch is actually a blog, not a newsletter. You're getting that subscription through the Kindle's practice of charging people for a subscription to blogs (a pretty controversial thing, considering you could easily go access the same exact content through the Kindle web browser for free). Obviously, the tradeoff is convenience.

You can also get FanHouse the exact same way. See here: http://www.amazon.com/Fanhouse/dp/B001LF3E1A/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1295124876&sr=8-1

It was also just recently purchased by AOL (for something in the $50 million range)--it was run, and continues to be run, by a former lawyer named Mike Arrington, who worked his ass off to make it a must read in Silicon Valley. They break big stories, including Google's acquisition of YouTube.

 

Convenience is the key. The Kindle format is a lot easier to read. Same with the NY Times. I can get for free on the WEB but it is a lot move convenient in Kindle format.

Perhaps I have an older model but my Kindle browser is very slow and cumbersome.

 

I think I know what you're trying to say with your post, but this line is akin to newspapers wanting continually great content and outta-this-world print/electronic variety from leaner overworked staffs after buyouts and layoffs.

You can't have both. The product suffers. In this case, Fanhouse will suffer.

All of the fantasy bullshit and aggregator content may "drive traffic." But the loss of strong, notable voices is troubling, again, because of the losses of writers and editors who left newspapers for Fanhouse with beliefs that the Web would be "the" way for the future ... as newspaper management and Web gurus have proclaimed for the last few years.

This kind of gutting sucks as badly as seeing the layoffs and buyouts at newspapers and the chains.

 

OK, gotta chime in here. I am a Patch employee and I just want to clear up the vast misinformation here. I know, I know, anything can happen in this biz at any time, but for the time being Patch is something AOL really, truly believes in. There is no hiring freeze - on fact, they just hired hundreds of people in order to meet their goal of launching 750+ sites by Jan. 1 2011. There is a slowdown now BECAUSE ALL THE PEOPLE HAVE BEEN HIRED. I feel very lucky to have this job. It rocks.

There is a very sophisticated business plan in place, and Patch surpassed every goal it set for the company for 2010. Eventually, ad sales will have to pick up, but there is some time for the sites to catch on, and the amount of ads that must be sold is not that big.

Also, they are offering a product that gives people something they can't get anywhere else - 24/7 news about their town. Where my Patch is, that is only available in a weekly paper.

Meanwhile, there are bonus and raises for 2011. Working there is a breath of fresh air after the dark days and low morale of print journalism, where I was for many years.

 

*This* web venture is different from all the others.

 

Didn't someone have a feud with anon211 on the Sportspages board?

 

"Oh, the movie never ends. It goes on and on anon anon ..."

 

Are you high enough that they'd tell you anything?

 

I've expressed my wishes for the best possible outcome to Moddy and a few others I know at the AOL ventures. They're all outstanding professionals and wonderful people, and they deserve a happy resolution, whatever happens. My heart goes out to anyone who loses a job or is working under the stress of worrying about it.

And that's a long list right now, sadly.

There's a lot of wisdom on this thread. A lot of frustrating this-is-where-we-are too. I had two brief flirtations with the AOL platforms, one in 2009 and one in 2010. The timing wasn't right in either case (or maybe I wasn't right), but I have no complaints about how Ridge or anyone else at that level or below handled it. Scott told me things on the hiring front would take some time, but he was confident about the reasons behind the slow pace because, he said, top brass were in it for the long haul. I'm sure this latest news comes as quite a blow to him, and I feel for him. Tremendous journalist, as others have said. I enjoyed our conversations.

One thing I wondered about in 2009 and still do: The concept of re-branding. If the Wall Street Journal were to change its name to The Street because someone at the top thinks it sounds more "now," the Journal would lose many decades of hard-earned name recognition, the value in that and the reputation of the name, and the credibility it brings. I mention this because I was curious about AOL calling all its different news platforms by different names other than AOL. Someone said, "Well, AOL is so '90s. It's like a dinosaur in the Web world. They have to."

And I get that, to an extent. But I know people who have been on AOL since 1996, and they still don't know Lisa Olson writes for AOL, that the other big names do, that there's an incredible amount of professional, old-school journalism being done there with all the modern tools. I'm not saying this played much of a role in what's happened, but sometimes I wonder about the wisdom of not bringing to bear the power of the name you've established. Fans on message boards who tire of gossip and rumor say "I'll take it seriously if the (insert name of paper here) reports it." I think that's the power of decades of credibility and name recognition. I think in some ways newspaper sites that call themselves "Big City Live" or "Mountain Region Today" or "Coastal City Wired" lose the value of the name they've made for themselves.

Just my two cents, and again, it's not anywhere close to being at the core of what's going on. Just a tangent that interests me.

Good luck to all.

 

Quoted for posterity, and so that we can reflect back on this next year, when Patch shuts its doors.

Patch will not survive. Absolutely, positively, will not survive. AOL isn't patient enough to work thru the kinks and figure out that pictures of gas prices and stories about the kids meeting the Easter Bunny at KMart are not what will keep people coming back, nor is it patient enough to wait for the owner of Big Bob's Hardware to die and for his kids to figure out people aren't reading newspapers anymore and that his advertising should go to the web.

I went to the web in 1999. Lost my first two Internet-only jobs in 2000. This is the same old fucking song and dance. There is no safe haven. Get the fuck out of the business. Everyone.

 

The key word there is "for the time being." I look at all these sites void of ads and wonder, "why are their editors getting paid considerably more than me when no income is rolling in?" It's the reason I didn't go over there in the first place when I had the chance.