This profile on the potential of niche news on the Web brings back memories of my time running www.breakingtweets.com, a niche site focused on Twitter and news. It was profiled as far away as the UK, France, Russia, and Japan (a print magazine article which I have a copy of). It was featured by the Poynter Institute twice (here and here). It built up 15,000+ Twitter followers. And at its height, it was visited daily by newsrooms like BBC, The New York Times and CNN, according to Google Analytics.
Of course, Breaking Tweets didn’t achieve this success overnight. It was many hours of hard work which I’ll get into in a second. But it was indeed a super niche site that created ripples in the journalism world as the first news site to treat tweets like quotes (now it’s a common practice). It also allowed me to do awesome networking with talented journalists, editors, and producers from all sorts of organizations I have the utmost respect for.
But I could never monetize the site. That was the problem. I was working on Breaking Tweets seven days a week, sometimes 50 hours or more, while attending grad school night classes, but besides the pennies at a time from Google Adwords, it never made money. I was a content person with no experience in business. And while I had more than 40 volunteer contributors come and go, I could never find a go-to reliable business partner or someone who believed in the site as much as I did to take it to the next level.
All was not lost. First of all, I had a lot of fun doing it and operating an independent news source. It led to a teaching gig at DePaul University and later my current job at The Huffington Post. And I learned so much during that time, particularly about SEO, HTML, and social media, and covering breaking news. It was all about experimentation. Trying out all kinds of content and seeing how users responded. Stories that did well, I produced more of.
Here’s a great quote from that profile of The Awl:
“My friends keep talking to me about how they want to start a Web site, but they need to get some backing, and I look at them and ask them what they are waiting for. All it takes is some WordPress and a lot of typing.”
-Chloire Sicha, one of the site’s founders
It’s very true. Just do it. That’s what I did and with plenty of hard work, constant experimentation and some innovation, new features and design improvements along the way based on user feedback, Breaking Tweets was able to build a loyal readership. Seriously, everything was about the users. That was the model for growth. And grow the site did, with traffic doubling from April to May, and doubling again from May to June in 2009.
I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything in the world. And if I can do it, anyone can. The Web allows for such sites to spring up and grow quickly.
