Content delivery problem and News Feeds

3 replies
Greetings everyone,

I'm new to this forum having stumbled upon it a couple of times through my google search; thought it was a good enough time to join it. In advance, please forgive me if this post isn't in the correct section as I'm not entirely sure if it entirely fits here. I have two quandaries (lol).

Here's some incite about what's going on so you know my position. I've been working on my website, a comic book production site, for some time now and one of the major problems that we're facing is having enough content for delivery. Considering we're new on the block, primary content development is slow and will take some additional time and money for us to produce. In the mean time, we've looked into secondary content delivery to hold us over, or at least to segment delivery of our primary content ...and for the most part satiate users while primary content is being developed. We hit a bit of a snag and now our site's source of secondary content is no longer available leaving what would seem like, a dead site *shivers*.

So then we put even bigger emphasis in trying to come up with secondary content, this time without too much of a production overhead (the secondary content that we were using for the time being was another webcomic). The other problem I also wanted to solve is how to take possible advantage of a subscription. For that still we needed more content. The result was a social interaction idea on facebook that we've consistently held for the last year with delivery every Tuesday free. Unfortunately, this is all we have working at the moment.

So for the most part, our saving grace in not looking dead has been our social media activity, but here exists another problem: users aren't engaging! We've even created a call to action at the bottom and yes occasionally we'll get a like or two either on the post or on the article listed, but above that, we'd be lucky to manage a comment. If I had to guess, it's because the content isn't engaging enough. So we were thinking of coming up with more, but then the big questions were, what, were to put it, and could it be locked down as premium content?

Right now we have a social media fan page, and a website which acts as a typical news feed site and somewhat a portal for our primary and secondary content. However "news" has been considerably slow since our secondary content dropped. What was at least an update on the site every two weeks has staggered to more than a month blank. Most of what we're using to engage with has been on the social networks, thus my questions.

Would it be better, instead of having a news and article based website, to organize the site as a catalogue based site with our upcoming exclusives (basically functioning as a master portal site) and leverage the news feeds and possible event/specific updates to the fan site and eliminate a separate news feed? Or if there's nothing really wrong with the current model, then should I still instead just use my social feed as news instead of creating an entirely different news feed since direct site news is so limited?

The other concern is of us taking advantage of subscription service revenue. Should we change to catalogue format, it might be harder for us to utilize this model. The entire point of the subscriptions is to help us fund the production cost of the primary product (obviously). Advertising and selling space instead of subscriptions is out of the question really, as we have not generated enough foot traffic to make our space valuable, and we don't have a product to sell just yet....or enough content to merit a click through. With a news and article based site, that type of model works fine depending yet again on the content. But for a catalogue, I don't see it really working unless I'm missing something. Any ideas on this?

Apologies for the winded first post, but I'm hoping I can find something for this, or at least a hint. I'm certainly not looking for WHAT secondary content to deliver, that's what we'll need to figure out slowly. What I'm looking for is ideas on HOW I should deliver the secondary content now...given the circumstances.

Thanks all and I appreciate any and all help, and glad to be here
#content #delivery #feeds #news #problem
  • Profile picture of the author dewayneboyd
    Isn't there plenty of industry news or topics you can write about? Just checked Google News and found 20 articles published in the last 24 hours based on the keyword "comic books." There's probably a lot more under different keywords. Some of those would provide ideas for even more than one article.

    I don't really get your business model as far as creating a primary product. If you are a comic business, isn't part of the business actually having someone on the team who can create your product? If you are outsourcing the production of an expensive comic book, then it's pretty clear you have no indication whether you can even make back your money.
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    1,574,810 unique visitors and counting. And that's just one of my websites.

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    • Profile picture of the author XTREEMMAK
      Hi there,

      Thanks for the reply. The industry news outlet approach is pretty much what we don't want to be. Like you said, there's already an existing number of outlets for these already (one of the larges being comicbookresources.com, much of it with open free content). These sites are more towards the news press and media while we're closer to publisher developer. It wouldn't really make much sense for us to talk about the latest DC comic of latest Shonen Jump unless it's in social context (aka like on Facebook or Twitter).

      True that we are outsourcing development since finding reasonable capable talent in our area has been considerably difficult, but this is also why we're not paying the total cost of development directly (at least, not all of it initially). Forgot to mention in regards to background is that we did attempt an organized/planned kickstarter a few months ago. We're turning to subscriptions to get us closer to attaining workable stable revenue rather than start up capital for a single ip.

      What I'm looking for is an idea of what seems more functional. If we can scale to a dedicated news feed after our content range finally begins to scale, then that's fine. Should we really spend more time increasing our social activity and content (that we can't make a profit on any) and minimize secondary content delivery on our regular site, or would that just end up hurting us?
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  • Profile picture of the author XTREEMMAK
    I should probably add that even though we're not trying to be an industry news outlet, what we don't mind doing is showing/helping in industry (or related industry) development. An example that has been helping us keep attention is our industry artist feature that is completely unrelated to us. We feature an artist, add some background, implement links to them and their content, etc., but only on Facebook. Again, this is free content, but if we really can't leverage direct news (or enough of it) ourselves, then it might just be better to aim towards industry development or tutorials on how to do that....

    Again the question becomes where? I saw a post on here saying that we could probably push that to email instead and make money that way somehow? Maybe that'd be better than a direct monthly subscription base?
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