The "Independent Jason Calacanis" story is over, for now. Any predictions about Jason are always dangerous, but this time his ever morphing, ever alive Silicon Alley train has been hoisted: his company Rising Tide Studios (RTS), and the database and website Venture Reporter (which came in after Silicon Alley Reporter magazine closed down mid-2001) has been bought out by Wicks Business Information, a B2B media company covering the investing and private equity market (perhaps best know for its VentureOne website and database), PaidContent.org has learned. Venture Reporter magazine, which was launched as a bi-monthly in January 2002, only had five issues before it was closed down.
The bottom line is that we created something of true value with Venture Reporter and some thing that made people want to pay for content. We sold hundreds of research reports for hundreds of thousands of dollars in the last six months. We also sold hundreds of $1,000 database passes. In fact we reached profitability with the exception the MCG loan.
Frankly, the only reason anyone was interested in what we were doing was because we shifted from a business that was 95% advertising, sponsorship and event based to a business that was 95% based on paid content.
Also, it didn't hurt that we basically leveled the second biggest brand in the space, VentureWire , in under a year. Venture Reporter was a database and Venture Wire was a blog. There is nothing wrong with blogs, but let's be honest here a blog is not a business . It might be a profitable hobby in some cases but I don't think a blog is going to make anyone rich any time soon. We went to market and said "we'll give you the same newswire (aka blog) features of Venture Wire but we will also let you search for deals by date, amount, location, industry, venture capital firm, amount invested, etc." That value proposition lead to the same result each time: people signed up for us and let go of their VentureWire subscription.
That is the big lesson I think.. blog + database + research reports = big business, blog plus nothing = a hobby.
In my mind blogs have killed the newsletter business. You can't be just a newsletter any more because some talented and ambitious fellow who has been laid off will spend $99 to host a blog to kill his former boss. The only protection you have is to build something bigger and better then a blog. Blogs are killing the weak publishers.
..to be honest working with no resources in the worst publishing market in three decades (and the worst advertising market in the history of advertising) has not been a party...
