Reno, 2018 |
For a last post here this year, I thought I would review
the “new” Blogtyrant’s advice on niche blogging (under its new ownership).
Generally, my perception is that niche blogs make money
when there is an underlying transactional business. That would be true of video channels. A great recent example of the latter is Max
Reisinger’s Perspectopia. Max is a 17
year old starting college at UNC and who has lived in France but started a
business making t-shirts at 16.
Sometimes a niche is more obvious. John Fish and his college channel from
Harvard has drawn almost a million subscribers, although he hasn’t taken up
blogging separately (so far). In his
case it is relatively simple to find corporate sponsors, like Audiobooks, who find
the content wholesome and upbeat for consumers.
The mechanics of getting an audience on YouTube has gotten
more attention recently, with the publicity about the partner program, “commercial
viability”, COPPA compliance, and the like.
With blogs it was more old school, with particular
attention to email subscriptions, which a lot of people don’t want because of
spam problems and trustworthiness for security.
I did violate their advice when I started out with
Blogger in 2006, and blogged about “all” the news. But that’s partly because of how I got into
commentary, starting with gays in the military in the 1990s. It got to be about privacy, then about duty
(the military draft), fairness, freedom of speech, and then individual self-agency
v. identarianism.
So I really had nothing to “sell” in the usual sense,
as the books are old (the most recent is 2014). The best way to narrow it would
be my music (well explained now on a Wordpress blog), the novel, the screenplay,
or perhaps a documentary film idea floating around which we’ll come back
to. It came up last February in a
scramble involving a pitchfest.
My whole blogging setup is due for an enormous simplification
at the start of 2022 (one more year), and I’ll come back to that soon.
Note: the videos for Blogtyrant are older and are all
by Ramsay. I don’t how his climate
change activity in Australia (tree planting) is going but I would love to know.