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Post by Jason on Nov 18, 2011 20:59:40 GMT
And, now reading your parts Richard, it looks in Part III as you essentially provided the model for Guardian Sports Network. You are indeed read in high places.
Were you lot concerned about doing something similarly, with a main hub, port of call for readers to visit with online highways to all the blogs? Or are we speaking of a SB Nation-esque site where bloggers put their individual content at the same place?
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Post by ahmedbilal on Nov 18, 2011 21:02:46 GMT
To get things started: 1. If you're looking to make more money out of football, there's two ways - get a real job or be smart about building your business. More about this on the footballmedia.com/blog 2. If it's just about traffic, you can email me your site URL and I'll give you my feedback on how to increase traffic. ahmed@soccerlens.com or ahmed@footballmedia.com. 3. Collaboration - it all boils down to what you want - traffic / exposure / sheer pleasure of writing OR money to pay the bills. For the first one, see #2. For the second part, Football Media goes some way towards helping bloggers do that but we would love to do more, so I'm open to suggestions (and also aware that no one here is a part of Football Media so if you have any questions let me know). 4. I don't think GSN works for anyone else but the Guardian, so whatever we decide to do here has to put the bloggers first. To do that you need more than just goodwill, you need someone with the distribution to make it work (access to lots of football blogs) and the financial backing to get it off the ground. In my mind, Football Media ticks both boxes. I guess it comes down to what you're looking for - money, traffic, recognition or all 3, and what are you willing to give in order to get it (your time, putting ads on your site, spending more time promoting your site, etc). I'll check back later - feel free to ping me with any questions, happy to help.
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Post by Ian on Nov 18, 2011 21:05:43 GMT
In all honesty, I think this should be about looking to the future rather than dwelling upon the past.
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Post by Ian on Nov 18, 2011 21:06:14 GMT
(To Gavin, last page, that was)
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2nd Yellow
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Football blog - the ugly side of the beautiful game
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Post by 2nd Yellow on Nov 18, 2011 21:06:45 GMT
I have two questions for Ahmed:
1) What does Football Media do?
2) What do they get out of it?
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Post by ahmedbilal on Nov 18, 2011 21:12:52 GMT
Football Media helps football sites make more money. We then take a share of the profits.
How it works - you sign a non-exclusive agreement with FM to represent you in front of advertisers, brands and agencies. We bring in higher paying deals / more deals than you would get on your own (power of collective bargaining plus industry contacts), and generally speaking you end up earning more revenues with us (even after the profit share) than you would on your own. And you're free to negotiate your own ad deals if you so choose, or pass them all on to us if you'd have it completely outsourced.
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Post by rwhittall on Nov 18, 2011 21:13:00 GMT
Hi Jason, not sure if you're asking me but we were definitely more about the former, with a complex ad profit share scheme. Tom and Brian (of PI and RoP) were the brains.
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Post by ahmedbilal on Nov 18, 2011 21:14:49 GMT
I dont want to take over the thread or anything so if everyone else can share what they need help with the most, it'll give us an idea of what the most pressing collective needs are, and then we can discuss the best solutions to them.
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2nd Yellow
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Football blog - the ugly side of the beautiful game
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Post by 2nd Yellow on Nov 18, 2011 21:19:06 GMT
Thanks Ahmed.
So, let's cover the moral support aspect first. What can we get out of a formal arrangement? For example, knowledge sharing, a collective voice to protect our sites (beyond the outrage on Twitter etc)...thoughts?
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Post by Jason on Nov 18, 2011 21:22:57 GMT
Richard, it was to no one in particular but thanks for clarifying. That would seem a way for the sites to remain their own quirky selves but have a more unified scheme. How complicated was the ad thing?
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Post by aliverpoolthing on Nov 18, 2011 21:26:39 GMT
Is there really a need of having blogs under one umbrella? Wouldn't the same SEO issues that were raised about the Guardian network persist? And, in truth, what would it achieve? I'me subscribed to my favourite blogs on my Google Reader which effectively does the work that is being proposed. If I miss something really good, I rely on the people I'm following on Twitter to flag it up. In truth, I rarely ever go check a website to see if they've added anything new anymore. Don't know if I'm alone in doing so but I suspect not.
One idea that I have been thinking about is that of bloggers working on a paid for project together.
At the moment I'm reading a book called The Best American Sports Writing of 2011. Basically, they sift through magazines looking for the best pieces which they then put together in a book.
Why not do something similar with independent bloggers? There's no need to actually publish a physical book but you can go down the e-book format to limit costs. Then any profits can either be shared between all those who contributed or else put into a central fund to be used when there is the need (e.g. someone wants professional help to redesign a site).
And there would be the added benefit that those who are featured can legitimately say that they are 'published' authors in the traditional sense.
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Post by ahmedbilal on Nov 18, 2011 21:29:31 GMT
Personally I think the reason The Simplest Game didn't take off was because you guys didn't have the traffic / didn't have the necessary advertising connections to make it work. From personal experience, even a site like therepublikofmancunia.com or soccerlens.com (not huge but bigger in traffic than all of the TSG sites combined) doesn't do that well by itself. You need 10, 20, 30 times that number to start attracting serious (high paying) advertisers.
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2nd Yellow
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Football blog - the ugly side of the beautiful game
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Post by 2nd Yellow on Nov 18, 2011 21:30:26 GMT
Because we're not talking about content syndication, this is about bloggers working together whilst still maintaining their own sites as individual entities.
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Post by ahmedbilal on Nov 18, 2011 21:34:32 GMT
Any aggregation model works against the individual blogger. GSN is new, we've seen plenty of such examples before (and manny scraper sites too). Re: moral support - you need not one but multiple influential voices, which will happen if you work collectively to grow your own sites. In terms of sharing resources / helping each other out, that's absolutely fine but would you make moral support your primary objective here? If yes, may I suggest group therapy? If not, then what would be the main objective?
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2nd Yellow
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Football blog - the ugly side of the beautiful game
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Post by 2nd Yellow on Nov 18, 2011 21:40:13 GMT
I mention the moral support aspect first because money takes time to grow, and because there has been so much discussion recently about how the community has changed and those who are dropping out.
And it can go beyond moral support to include our own areas of expertise whatever they may be. Mine is SEO and coding.
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