(Newswire.net — January 21, 2019) — The Daily Wot (dailywot.com) is one of several companies that have revolutionized online media by latching on to a simple – yet highly effective – business model. The company specializes in the art and science of churning out simple, yet high-quality articles for the entertainment of hundreds of thousands of users.
On the one hand, it relies on a whole team of people who create new content. The content covers all manner of categories, including ‘Health,’ ‘Inspirational,’ ‘Celebrity,’ ‘Travel‘ and more. For each of these categories, its team invests time and energy analyzing what is currently of interest to a critical mass of web users, then acts quickly to ensure that it is covering the hot stories while they are still hot and able to be monetized.
In a sense, what they have built is a ‘fast-media’ business, much in the same way that Zara has created a ‘fast-fashion’ business by monitoring the latest trends and building a supply chain to quickly ensure that those trends are adequately represented on the shelves of its stores. Of course, the key difference is that The DailyWot deals in media (no physical products). The digital, virtualized nature of its business enables the company to have a truly distributed network of freelancers and contractors doing all of the heavy liftings.
What about paying the bills?
Of course, it’s one thing to build a system that is effective at churning out articles that will resonate with a wide audience. But how have they handled the challenge of converting traffic into something that actually generates revenue? Although it may be evident to some, it is worth mentioning that by far the most common way to monetize traffic is to sell that traffic to advertisers.
The sale of traffic can take on many forms, including cost-per-mille (CPM), whereby an advertiser will pay a certain amount per thousand impressions. It would appear that the most common monetization method used by Dailywot.com is to sell to advertisers on a cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-action (CPA) basis. This means that whenever a user clicks on an ad or takes a pre-specified action after seeing an ad, the advertiser will pay The DailyWot a certain amount for the successful click or conversion.
This isn’t all that different to how traditional news websites monetize their services. The main difference is that while news organizations like the New York Times typically sell ads directly to large advertisers, The DailyWot relies primarily on its relationship with advertising and affiliate networks. What this enables is companies like Dailywot.com to build relationships with thousands of publishers and advertisers, and to automate the process of integrating with them largely.
Can this be made even leaner?
The DailyWot is in our view a solid representation of what an ever greater portion of the media industry will look like as the traditional news organizations face increasingly challenging market conditions. It’s a lean business that serves as the interface between thousands of consumers and thousands of advertisers/publishers. Whether someone will come along and show that this model can work profitably with an even leaner organization remains to be seen. For now, it looks as though Dailywot.com tells us a lot about what the future of the media industry will look like.