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enthusiastgroup.com
Two niche sports sites by Enthusiast Group have hit hard times. Is selling them the right answer? |
An interesting development with
Steve Outing, the founder of E-Media Tidbits (a loooong time ago), who's now publisher and founder of a social-networking company called the
Enthusiast Group, which targets
mountain bikers and
climbers. But both sites are struggling. YourClimbing.com generates 100,000 pageviews per month on 5,000 registered users; YourMTB is at 75,000 pageviews and 3,000 registered users.
The growth has not been fast enough for that to be a sustainable advertising-supported business," Outing recently wrote on his personal blog. "So we've decided to sell the sites and transition into serving media and brand companies with our social media publishing platform and services."
The company is seeking to sell the sites and become a technology provider to other media that need social networking tools. That, too, is a crowded field and there are no guarantees of success.
A few points about this:
- Will it work for a company to post a "We need your help" message or a "We're for sale" message on its own site?
- Are there some audiences or niche markets that are just too small to make a business work? Or were Steve and his partners too early or too late to the market?
- Did they not reach critical mass for ad sales? If so, what's critical mass? (Obviously, it will be different in different industries -- but how can one know what size will turn into critical mass?)
- Are there any "outdoor activities" advertising networks that might want to sell into the Enthusiast Group's audience? Some genres, such as travel sites, are repped by specific ad-sales networks, and don't have to reach their own critical mass.
- Would a mountain biking or climbing site work better as a subsidiary of a retailer -- either online or brick-and-mortar (like REI, Gander Mountain or Bass Pro Sports)? Would any of those be interested in capturing such a relatively small site and trying to grow it?
Disclosure time: As a longtime friend of Outing, and participant in this list roughly since he started it long before he sold it to Poynter, I wish Steve well. The difficulties he's encountered with the Enthusiast Group are not uncommon for entrepreneurs in interactive media. Let's hope he's able to work through them.
