Gambolin’ Man sent me an e-mail the other day on behalf of a woman who is hoping to develop a “hiking hub” online community. I received an e-mail from the same woman a couple weeks back but never got around to replying to it.
Here’s the deal as I see it: This woman works for an Internet-marketing firm that sets up sites around certain topics that get good search engine traffic. The firm creates a template that makes it easy to use the same design and structure for each topic-driven site, which keeps costs low: basically $100 a year for domain registration and web hosting after the Web site format is developed.
Ah, you ask, but where do they get the content that gives Web surfers an excuse to use these sites? That’s where we come in. As bloggers, we provide oodles of free, original content about a subject dear to our hearts. Aforementioned Internet marketers approach us and say “we want to create a community around hiking,” with a pitch that their “hub” will provide exposure to our blogs and and a central location for content we’re interested in.
All we have to do is give them permission to scrape the first few sentences of our posts, available automatically via RSS feeds, and voila: they have an instant content portal with zero content costs. They also keep all the revenue from clicks on Google ads and other contextual advertising.
But before you scream “I’ll die before I’ll them cash in on my free content,” you have to keep in mind how this set-up works. The creators of the envisioned “hiking hub” won’t generate much revenue on this individual site. You could demand a cut (which would be refused; free content is the business model) of the revenue your content generates, but the slice would be so small as to be not really worth the trouble.
That’s because our Internet marketers presumably plan to develop hundreds of these sites, so that each one’s nickels and dimes add up to dollars returned to the company. And frankly, they could do this without seeking our permission. Right now they’re asking some of us to participate because it’s wiser (and cheaper) to be up-front and avoid exposure to copyright infringement liability.
The original e-mail I received pointed to a pair of sites centered on E-learning and non-profits. Both looked like cookie-cutter-Internet-marketing-schemes-of-the-week at first glance, so I made a snap judgment that the proposal wasn’t worth delving into any further.
Now it occurs to me it would be sorta handy to have the latest hiking blog content aggregated at a central site. The current sample sites all link right back to the originating blogs, so it seems like any Web surfer who finds the quickie intros at this site is far more likely to click on our content than to click on the site’s ads. Also, all those links would help our Google rankings and get us more traffic (theoretically).
Unfortunately, the business model for this “hub” requires requires a stripped-down, cookie-cutter site format with nothing visually conveying “we really built this site with hikers in mind.” It can’t be Twitter for Hikers or Facebook for Backpackers.
And frankly, we might be just as well advised to look up Wade at Outdoorzy.com and ask him to build us the same site in his spare time. I’m thinking he could do it an afternoon, and at least we’d know a real hiker was handling the Web development.
Bottom line: if you’re approached to participate in this “hub,” it probably wouldn’t hurt anything and could help your Google rankings a bit. Just go in with eyes wide open and know what you’re signing up for. You have no obligation to donate your content to a profit-making venture, but the fact that somebody might earn some nickels and dimes on your content might not be reason enough to rule it out.
Agree with you on both points:
1. Allowing them to scrape & post extracts of our feeds won’t do us any harm, and will probably benefit us.
2. An aggregator created by a hiker would always be better.
I’m not convinced that aggregators do much good, unless it’s bolted onto an already popular site. I doubt that an aggregator would ever build up significant traffic. Alltop.com springs to mind .. it’s got some big names behind it (Guy Kawasaki) but although they use my feeds (without asking permission) I almost never see any traffic from it.
I’ve also seen sites that try and scrape content and geocode it to a map. I’d have thought that that might fare better when folk are looking for hikes in specific locales, but I haven’t seen any traffic impact from that yet either.
Best ways of generating traffic that I’ve seen is by referrals from highly trafficed and well established sites (eg. wikipedia, yelp) but we have to be careful not to spam these sites with our links, no matter how much they might add value to their content.
Stumbleupon has created my greatest traffic spikes, though I haven’t analyzed the benefit/bounces from that traffic in detail, the overall effect on my site was definitely a positive one.
Had the same initial reaction and thought process as you, just a few days ago. If it gets our work out to a potentially larger audience, continues with direct links to our individual sites, and does so only with our permission, I guess it couldn’t be all that bad, right?
I hate these kind of sites, and certainly don’t want to be part of one. As far as I’m concerned, it just dilutes our outreach by causing potential viewers to have to go thru one more ad riddled intermediate site with very little additional content, and it is one more site to pop up ahead of ours in Google.
These sites are popping up more and more when I google for something. A site with just a list of other sites that have some association with the original keywords. Sometimes they drop the keyword that really refines the search. In most cases they are not adding value to the internet – they may put up 1000 similar sites on different subjects, each maybe paying them $10 per month in click revenue, but all together a nice income.
Casey: it’s not reject-out-of-hand bad … but I do think if we put on our thinking caps we could build something as good or better.
The template is very bare-bones and not visually inviting to people interested in our niche.
Agreed on all counts.
Ralph: I had the same initial reaction and would not blame you for opting not to participate. I’m not sure I will, either.
The proliferation of these sites seems inevitable, especially in light of the declining economy, which will send more people online looking to make a buck, but interestingly, Google and its team of rocket scientist search engine experts seems to be constantly looking for ways to thwart such developments and ensure worthwhile search results.
I would not bet against the brains at google finding ways to filter these sites out of people’s searches.
My thing is, I was approached by another blogger asking what I thought about it. My initial rejection was reflexive, and life has taught me to distrust purely reflexive actions unrelated to pulling one’s hand out of the fire.
One worrisome thing, though, is that if Google starts downgrading these sites in its search results (which seems inevitable given that they provide no original content, which is the coin of the realm at Google), it may downgrade the sites they link to as well. After all a series of these sites could be created around an individual niche and all of them could link back to each other to bolster Google rankings, but if Google sees this as a deliberate ploy to juice google rank rather than provide worthwhile content, it could assume all the sites linked from these places are suspect as well.
When I first read this, I immediately thought of http://outdoors.alltop.com/, which is part of Guy Kawasaki’s topic-driven aggregator site.
I find the idea of a “hiking hub” based on a generic template that is one of a cluster of topic-specific hubs, managed by a web-marketing firm, highly unappealing. It wouldn’t be the type of “online community” I would be eager to be associated with or join.
I would prefer a hub created by folks who knew about and cared about hiking and added value to the community beyond a basic headline directory. I would also feel a lot better knowing they, and not web-marketers, received the click revenue generated from our content.
This is a great discussion for me to see. I’m pretty much behind this technology and you getting approached about creating a hiking hub.
A few things about all of this:
1. We aren’t an internet marketing firm – but the basic business model you describe (almost no money per site, but it might be self sustaining if there’s enough sites).
2. The original concept came out of my experience blogging in the world of eLearning. My blog is a bit like Two-Heel Drive and Gambolin Man. It’s as much a labor of love as it is anything else. It has decent traffic in its own niche, but I’m not big compared to any major publication. I have a group of fellow bloggers who I regularly exchange with – but 95% of the rest of the potentially interested audience doesn’t know about my blog or the rest of the blogs in this space. It’s hard for a newbie to deal with an individual blog much less a network of blogs. I also didn’t like having to keep my keyword categories up to date (Gambolin you are in the same boat – Two Heel – Dang you have a very nice category list – I don’t have the patience). So, what the site did was allow automatic categorization of my blog, it adds in social signals to help find better content (way better than Blogger’s search mechanism) and it brings together people who I consider to be the best bloggers in my space.
To me this adds value to people not familiar with blogs in the space and adds some value to bloggers.
The result has been a net increase to the blog network of significant traffic. That benefits everyone.
For me personally, it’s my second highest referral source behind Google organic. You can probably sleuth around a bit with Alexa and get ideas on that stuff.
You can see more on this:
http://browsemystuff.pbwiki.com/Browse-My-Stuff
3. Right now I’m only looking at doing hubs where I think it makes sense. I happen to like hiking … but I can’t say I know anything about hiking blogs – I could actually use this network to help me. There’s sites like EV Driven (www.evdriven.com) that’s around Electric Vehicles done with a friend of mine – Chris Paine. Realistically, I think this makes sense in a lot of domains where there are existing networks of bloggers writing around similar topics.
4. I agree that we really need to make this look better. We are going to try some things there, but we are a bit stuck with what we have for now.
5. This is not a community or an end destination. The point is to get traffic and comments and activity back onto the blogs. I personally hate when discussion and community goes someplace other than my blog. I really want this to make sense of a blog network not try to supplant it. But that’s my bias. I think there are other networks like socialmediatoday that want to create a community. That’s a different model.
6. You could certainly get something pretty close to this on your own but you likely would not have the social signals or the complexity of the keywording worked out quite as well. There’s some real work behind that stuff.
7. David said – “I would prefer a hub created by folks who knew about and cared about hiking and added value to the community beyond a basic headline directory.” – That’s actually supposed to be the point here and I think we’ve likely done a horrible job with all of you. I sensed there was a group of hiking bloggers who could get value from a topic hub like this. They would be able to say – here’s the good stuff. Yes – we hope to make a small trickle of dollars – but we also hope to help all the bloggers who participate and newbies who are not regular readers. And personally, I’m not interested in pursuing this if it’s not something welcomed by the bloggers involved.
I apologize if this sounds defensive – I’m not trying to be. Yes I am passionate about the technology and what I perceive to be the value. However, it’s quite instructive to see your reactions. I’m not here to try to convince you that this makes sense. I hope you’ll continue to provide thoughts even though it sounds like we won’t be doing this together.
Wow this is the longest comment I’ve ever left – sorry – but I’m also engaging right now with a blogger in the world of communities and networks about the ideas around topic hubs. Here are his posts:
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2009/02/16/communities-and-networks-connection-blog-aggregator/
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2009/02/17/how-relevant-are-communities-of-practice-in-a-network-age/
He probably gets this stuff at a deeper level than me.
I deleted this message too. However the reality is that anyone is legally allowed to scrape the first few lines of your post under the terms of “fair use” in copyright law without prior permission. However, they are not allowed to steal you content outright and I go after these people and get them to take it down. To do this, it is important to have up to date copyright notices on your site and/or to use one of the copyleft licenses like to creative commons, no derivatives license. Look at my site for examples.
As long as these feeder sites give sectionhiker.com prominent attribution, I’m usually ok with them acting as a hub. The reality is that a good hiking site develops a loyal following despite the presence of hubs in the ecosystem. Plus if you think you’re going to make adsense revenue with a hiking site, you’re delusional (YMMV).
I can’t really see the advantage to us in this situation. We may get a slight bump in hits, but that’s offset by the chance of google marking us as spam sites. If someone wants to make an aggregation site, it might as well be someone who is actually interested in the subject matter instead of someone who clearly just wants to make a quick buck.