More details have emerged on the reasons behind Toronto Life’s decision to scrap its blogs.
Publisher Sharon McAuley said the magazine was rethinking its approach as the blogs had failed to attract enough audience to justify their costs and that advertising revenue was lower than expected.
Commercial realities of the softening advertising market led to this reassessment, explained McAuley:
I think the whole industry is grappling a little bit with what’s going on in the advertising world. The online world had always been forecast to have a greater ad-dollar growth curve than print, and our online revenues continue to grow.
But blogs are not dead yet, Toronto Life web editor Matthew Fox told Masthead Online:
There are certainly ‘brand-name bloggers’ in Torontolife.com’s future, though they will not appear immediately. One possibility is the beginning of a real estate blog, which may come on-line in the next months. I can’t confirm if it will go through, but it is an idea that is already far into development. In the new year, and certainly in the event of a re-design, there will be additional bloggers added to our roster.
As Canadian Magazine comments, some of the high-profile blogs were barely given a few months to establish themselves. Philip Preville’s City State was live for barely a month.
As any seasoned blogger will know, it takes time, dedication and patience to build an audience.
(Via Newslab.ca)
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I have a small niche blog, but I get about 2000 views a month. I don’t monetize my blog – but it also took me more than a year to get that kind of traffic to my blog. The first four-six months the blog did much less and it has really only been since I hit more than 150 posts that I started seeing a lot of hits. Basically, I have one post that gets a lot of hits and 250 plus posts that get 1-4 hits a week. Put together, that gives me a lot of traffic – for a small niche blog.
I totally agree, you’ve got to be patient when building a blog. It is like a brand. It needs to have a focus, it needs to have interesting content, it needs to be updated often (twice a week minimum), it needs to be accurate, and it needs to serve a need.
My current blog is my second attempt at a blog. The first was a political blog, about which I know very little, but have lots of opinions. My second is about teaching high school journalism. I had 12 years of experience in the field when I started the blog.
I’m guessing they didn’t follow these rules and so they didn’t drive traffic to their site. Too bad.
Noticed that Toronto Life started a new blog on their site today, so maybe that new approach McAuley spoke about is finally taking shape.
http://www.torontolife.com/daily