Paid content comes to the Ompire
Our friends over at GigaOm are launching a new subscription service within their blog network. Called GigaOm Pro, it gives readers year-long access to a wide range of in-depth analyses on technology trends and issues for $79. The service intends to complement existing research reports published by the likes of Forrester and Gartner, but cost hundreds of dollars less.
It’s an effort to explain more than a blog can day-to-day. Topics, for now, cover mobile infrastructure, green information technology and digital consumer issues. More are also slated to launch in the coming weeks. Each vertical includes a general research report, notes on subtopics, editorials, quarterly reviews, and links to relevant articles.The reports are put together by the blog network’s editorial staff as well as analysts and content curators. Social features are limited at this point, but will eventually allow for easy information-sharing between subscribers and the staff, company founder and namesake Om Malik tells me.
What about linking to these articles from public-facing blogs like this one? Malik says the staff will deal with it on a case by case basis, but adds “my guess is that proper credit and link back from folks like yourself would be kind enough to do that.” Will do.
Media organizations like Bloomberg and Reuters have long paired reporting with in-depth research, but that research tends to focus on much larger, established industries. Everyone struggles to figure out the latest technology trends, especially among startups, and the market for doing it right could be big. Rivals like TechCrunch, PaidContent and niche sites like InsideFacebook also offer reports but cover somewhat different areas. The Pro site could be a solid new revenue source for GigaOm, and the sort of site we see more of in the future.
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About the Author, Eric Eldon
Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.
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