[Throwaway90283]

Why is it surprising?

It's faster and cheaper to write clickbait articles, and they have a wider appeal. People are much more likely to click and share something with the name, 'What Disney character are you?' or 'Top 10 reasons you should start going out on Tuesday nights', compared to anything on Gigaom. It takes a lot of time to write proper articles, to check the facts, to follow up with sources, and to maintain a respectable reputation.

I'm sure they could trim the fat, and maintain a small group of dedicated writers, pay the bills and make a living. However, they raised quite a bit of money, so they kind of need to go big or die at this point, and going big is not easy for the reasons I mentioned above.

[toni]

The kind of people paying for Janes.com or AviationWeek can also get all their news for free from MilitaryNews.com or such, but still, these sites continue to flourish and they are only growing because having an AviationWeek subscription is a "status". The kind of niche that was reading the old, industry-centric GigaOm would have no problem paying for such a subscription.

[dagw]

The huge difference is that I imagine that the vast majority of people subscribing to Janes don't do it with their own money, and as such aren't very price sensitive. I imagine that mosy people subscribing to GigaOm are almost certainly doing it with their own money.

Also IHS (the people who publish Janes) have a whole host of other products and well as consulting services, so they can easily afford to run Janes.com at a small loss as part of their marketing budget.

[toni]

I agree that Janes' subscribers are using their corporate credit cards to pay the subscription costs, but I also think that Gigaom had the potentials to walk into the same path.

Take a look at the first screenshot in the story[1], Om Malik describes the site in 2006 as a "broadband weblog". The kind of quality articles on Gigaom were not comparable with link-baity nature of TechCrunch/Mashable or Engadget/Gizmodo. They could have been the Janes of IT industry if they wanted to. Or at least be as affordable as the AviationWeek.

Notice someone on this thread is describing Gigaom as "boring", I take that as a compliment about the fact that the site was very industry-centric and devoid of click-baity stories.

[1] https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/896/1*ajvdVfFtBytF...

[dagw]

could have been the Janes of IT industry

Which part of Janes? If you look at the whole portfolio of service offered by iHS, then they are much closer to something like Gartner Group than a publishing house. I imagine that the real money comes from writing custom reports and consulting work, with the high technical and very expensive years books coming in second. Their books and magazines are probably as much a marketing tool as a revenue stream.

[mtbcoder]

> I'm sure they could trim the fat

Indeed, the article mentions they were paying for office space in both Manhattan and San Francisco.