Greetings, Cleveland Browns supporters!
To be really honest with you, it’s becoming more and more difficult for me to do this Newswire single day. It’s not that I mind rising early, reading up on, and then rambling on for three hundred odd times a year about some football topic unrelated to the Browns. That portion is kind of cool.
Navigating through all the attempts to take money from me along the road is starting to grow to be a pain in the ass.
You see, the way that the media business is breaking down, media entities have just a couple of ways to run things.
One way is not to do much in the way of original journalism and, therefore, not spend much money on writers or “content development”. Those types of businesses can pay a single person or a handful of people to surf the web and social media, find stuff, and regurgitate it with their take and the occasional light analysis piece. It’s easy to start a business like that – there are at least a dozen of them in the Browns space. You then do whatever you can to get “distribution” for your content through Google, Yahoo, MSN, social media or other networks so that you can get enough traffic to make some bank from the ads you serve. It’s not a way to get rich, but if you can create a network of these sites, then you can reap some money. Their journalistic value is near zero, but it’s a viable model because enough Browns fans will click on them.
The other way is to actually try to do original journalism, pay your writers a living wage, and do things like get unique information, cover the team in person, or do hard-core analysis that actually takes time to do. This, of course, costs money, and to recoup that money requires more than just slapping some ads up on a page. You must have well-monetized videos, subscribers, or some other radical approach to extract cash from your visitors to break even. This is also tough, requiring a careful balance between what you make free and what’s behind the paywall and so forth.
Of course, things aren’t as black-and-white as all that. Some of the first types of sites sometimes do decent analysis or have good takes. Sometimes, the latter type of sites throw out pure dreck and clickbait.
As someone who has to surf them all every morning, things are becoming increasingly a pain in the ass. The first type of site is multiplying as more and more folks try to recreate the simple model with varying success. This creates a flood of repetitive and not-all-that-great content, which I largely ignore. I have to create specialized Google feeds specifically tailored to leave out site after site to remove the repetitive cruft, probably angering the (often good) people who run those sites.
All I can say is that “I’m sorry” if I ignore your site. I’ve decided it’s not worth my time to wade through the repetitive stuff to get to the original concepts. That doesn’t mean I don’t like you or appreciate your efforts. Some of these sites are run by people I consider friends. It just is what it is.
As far as the sites investing money in content are concerned, navigating their sites is increasingly an exercise in frustration as they put more and more content behind paywalls, blast noisy videos at you without permission, increase load times with gigantic ads, and throw up ad blocker blockers to annoy you. And, yes, 247Sports is guilty of some of this as they try to turn a profit as well.
At any rate, it’s a pain in the ass to navigate each morning, no matter how much technology I throw at it. And I’ve thrown technology at it that costs me several hundred dollars a month to maintain – scrapers that pull content off of sites that don’t support RSS feeds, subscriptions to paywalled sites so I can see if their paywalled content is worth linking, ad blocker subscriptions so I don’t have to wait four minutes for pages to load, you name it.
All of this so I can provide you with a set of links every morning that hopefully maximize the information you get about the Browns while minimizing the annoyances.
The things I do for you people! All for a handful of upvotes each day. I’ve got two feeds that throw over 200 articles at me daily that, at most, have 3-4 articles worth even considering for a link. We’re talking about finding needles in haystacks here
