Forum Moderators: phranque
Basically, my (and I guess many others here) business model is to provide quality information on a topic and then either sell advertising and/or run Google ads. I also thought I'd seen the future coming and added a lot of geo-tagging to images and articles.
Well a few years on it seems like I am the middle man and features such as Google Local are going to impact more and more on my revenues. Add to this that lots of local info is dragged in from sources such as Wikipedia (incl. articles citing my sites!), photo sites and review sites and I am rapidly failing to see the point in my website.
At the end of the day it seems like Google would ideally like to be entirely self contained. After they have extracted the World's information from existing websites and been given it by all those users (support the small guys, not!) there will be little requirement for external sites.
Unfortunately, I enjoyed putting together quality contents and photos and making bespoke user friendly websites. I don't think this will be enough in years to come and the business will have turned into something that there is no pleasure in for me.
I'm now considering my career options.
The internet will be the same. There's always a future in the next big idea, but you need to be at the top of your game to sustain a business model on the same topic for an extended period of time.
Empires are generally built from conquering more than one niche. Farmers generally grow more than one crop. Empires usually consist of more than one country.
I think for long term stability it's a good idea to build new sites. A typical workflow:
Build across different niches and monetization programs. Think about trends and seasons so that you can take advantage of seasonal swings. You will see that income will tend to balance out because some sites tend to boom even while others dip. It cushions you from the dips as well as increasing the amount of money you'd otherwise make if you simply stuck to one site.
