If you want a glimpse at what a media outlet might look like in the future take a look at how Dare’s Mike Litman has developed his blog. Using a similar model to Newser he’s curating content from around the social, marketing and PR web and presenting it in a highly visual format. And it’s working – he’s broken into the top 150 in the AdAge ranking of marketing blogs.
In Mike’s own words:
“Traffic in raw terms dipped a little in the first month since I changed things around a bit but its normalising again (up 90% in the past month). Time spent on site per person and social engagement per post is all up considerably.”
“Postrank reports that 72% of all site engagement now happens via Twitter, with Delicious accounting for a further 14%, and FriendFeed 2%. It’s a reflection of the far reaching, multi platform age.”
“I’ve noticed that trend over the past year where tweeting is the new blog commenting. Its blog commenting for the time poor but at the same time its more social. I always find commenting on blogs to be a closed experience so it seems to make sense.”
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=c639c7f9-e600-40b3-a73f-07ada2d615b4)
Bet it looks pretty upsetting on an iPad though…
In all seriousness, if mobile is the future As Google like to say then surely there’s a massive
conflict here no? Sites in this style really struggle to translate.
—–
Written on a mobile device
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Jo Douglas, Hayley Sivner. Hayley Sivner said: mahoosive congrats going out to our very own @litmanlive for this little beauty http://bit.ly/bWDa8E [...]
[...] Mike Litman’s blog as a model for future of media outlet [...]
I really like the Litmanlive format – it’s an nice evolution. But where’s the money? Isn’t the crux of answering the ‘future of media’ about the ugly simplicity of being economically sustainable?
I hear what you are saying Will and of course money makes the world go round but I’ve always held the belief that my blog isn’t a money making tool and stuck to that quite vehemently. So maybe in that respect it doesn’t represent the future, but it represents a shift personally to more of a curator than creator. I still love creating, just find that I’m not able to do as much as before but wanted to keep the blog running so I had to think about different ways of going about that.
One thing that has always remained constant is that I don’t run ads on the site and have turned down several fairly lucrative advertising offers as my impartial judgement and perspective is my USP. Once I start messing around with that, I have no right to an unbiased opinion and destroy all the hard work done thus far.
For the money it doesn’t make, it does bring me immense unquantifiable value and is a useful tool I’d recommend to anyone wanting to do the walking and talking.
So it seems to be that there’s a fine line between an impartial personal blog and a funded news site. There doesn’t seem to be much in between.
You’re right that the ‘future’ does require monetization and to be economically sustainable and if it was a full time job then I would need to think about making money off the back of it.
However, it’s more a labour of love, a hobby, a past time for me so sustainability for me lies in the fact that it gets updated frequently.
Michael – I think Will was being flippant…
A mind reader is one thing I’m not Robin
I wasn’t being flippant. But I was probably a bit hasty.
I totally support what you say about your approach Mike. What I was really getting at, was just that I’m fascinated by the problem of the finding the future model for media, and that for me the tricky bit is the money bit. So when I saw Wadds’ blog title, I was excited. When I saw your blog format, I was still excited and engaged. But then I couldn’t help thinking ‘yes – nice and good, but not yet the solution I was looking for’.
I don’t expect you to solve it Mr Litman. It’s a niggle that I should stick somewhere else. That is all.
I think design can solve the problem. I think we need to design a better model for media. But it needs to go further.
Sorry if I’ve been a bit confusing.