TechWag

This is an excerpt from an upcoming book - Boom and Bust in the Blogosphere.

Messy Media was a UK based group/team blog over a number of different properties that stopped publication in July of 2008. The blogging web site started with a large amount of fanfare around the project hosted in the UK . Part of the initial problem with the web site though was not just its launch, but also the idea of “hoping” that the web sites would be a moneymaker . Rather than stating outright that the web sites would be a moneymaker, it seemed that everyone was hedging their bets from the start of the system. The reason for the failure was a combined model of not getting the audience they needed, not being able to find geographically based writers, as well as the advertising revenue model failing for the team blog.

Two former Yahoo executives, Lloyd Shepherd, and Andrew Levy started messy Media to a loud launch in September of 2007, looking to create a blog empire for various interests across the UK. The first blog in the series was WestMonster that reviewed British politics, and was written by Sadie Smith . The intention of the WestMonster blog was to talk about British politics and put a spin on it so that British politics might be interesting to a vast majority of readers . American political blogs like the Huffington Post have been extraordinarily successful. The goal was to make these a money making endeavor from the start, in line with experiences that had been successful in the USA.

Part of the initial problem with messy media was not accounting for the cultural differences between the business models that work in the USA and how they could be translated into the English business landscape.

There are also other differences in how media operates in the UK, which Lloyd Shepherd and Andrew Levy knew about as they came from a media background, as well as experience in Yahoo. The business decision to start the blogs was sound, but by trying to recreate an American style media empire within the UK have a number of unique problems that are not found in the American Model. Advertising revenue would be difficult to obtain off network, while there are still advertising firms; print media is still popular in the UK although with mixed numbers , in relationship to what is being seen in the American print media with their falling numbers of readers . 61% of English households had access to the internet in comparison to 63% in the USA, however, that is only 15 million households in England while in the USA there are 168 million users with the internet. This lack of density of population would have made it hard to have a pure play UK niche funded by advertising. Messy Media by focusing on the smaller niche of English politics with an internet audience that would be interested in politics in general, the niche would have ended up being too small to attract a steady number of readers. With newspapers competing with the web and the tax subsidized BBC web sites, the project was going to have a very difficult time translating the American mega blog model like B5Media or Gawker into the English internet audience.

With the niche planned for WestMonster being difficult at best, it would have been a better decision to open up an initial web site based on Soccer (football) which would have a global audience as their initial flagship rather than politics. By opening up a web site with a stable of writers rather than risking the ship on one blogger, they might have been able to come up with a web site that was continually pumping out new information every day. As it was, coverage was spotty on both WestMonster and Glitter Ditch that would make connecting with the blogs difficult. With the launch of WestMonster not generating the revenue, they launched Glitter Ditch as a scandal rag sheet written by Sian Meades , which would be more in line with the scandal rags that are popular in the UK and the USA. The titles, the topics, and the information were dead bang on for a site that sought to report on the weirder aspects of stars worldwide.

The problem was that it was only on line for about 6 and one half months from start to finish. This would not be enough time to capture an audience for the site , and with the focus on one writer who was not able to blog multiple times per day, the quality, and quantity of the content were not enough to bring this to anyone’s attention. To make this web site stronger, they should have hired more bloggers, and should have developed more content that would have been good enough to capture the attention of the general populace. The biggest problem with Glitter Ditch was not just the meager quantity of material, but also the lack luster writing that when you read the articles reads like long slow swearing campaign. This is in contrast to those things that Sian Meades has written on other venues, or on television that would confuse the public at large as to her image or what she is about between media venues.

There are a number of reasons why Messy Media failed, not just with the business model, but the writers and the inability to engage an audience on their web sites.

1. Confusion about writers credentials or expertise, lack of quantity content with dubious quality surfacing often on line
2. Not enough readers to interest advertisers by choosing the wrong niches to write in, niches with a true local appeal when the density of population would not support that niche
3. Failed business model, using the standard American advertising based model, there was nothing at the messy media sites that would have attracted a local advertiser, not through the writing, or through the rest of the messy media system

The reasons for messy media to fail are simple, but also complex. To launch a major media empire, the focus on one blogger for a site who would not nor could not blog every day, or multiple times per day kept the content numbers low. By not engaging with social media, or writing about something that an affiliated group of bloggers could write about there are few if any back links, or discussions about the subject. Confusion over the bloggers image as it contrasted across print, television and blogging media would have further alienated the reading public. Relative density of interconnected households in terms of raw numbers of people, when focusing on a specific country niche also caused problems that would have been difficult to overcome.

While glitter ditch was a good attempt at broad appeal, the dearth of content would have made it hard for people to engage with the site. The use of language would have also been something that people would not have gravitated too, causing alienation of readers in the older age bands. All of these reasons would have directly influenced the lack of advertising, and without advertising, it is hard to use WestMonster or glitter ditch as a flagship site for the Messy Media group. With the general confusion over what the sites were meant to be, messy media was unable to make their model work.

Tags: messy media, blogging network, failure, out of business, layoff, business model, blogging model, business, model

Tags: web 2.0, funding, education, layoff, business, Politics, sad //