The Giant Opportunity in Niche Media
In January, after years of hanging around the offices “advising”, aka eating treats and learning how to use an oyster knife, I begin my role as COO at Food52.com, the community-sourced-recipe food blog turned influential media brand, turned commerce + media + community juggernaut founded by Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs. I am downright giddy that I've jumped up and grabbed the tail of the rocketship just as it’s taking off.
And I’m not giddy because I think I can help grow their traffic to 100 million visitors by expanding to cover fashion and employing social media arbitrage. What I am excited about is the explosive growth we can achieve by building out a business that serves this passionate, wonderful, diverse food and cooking community from every angle.
I’m excited about the cooking knowledge, inspiration and recipes (oh the recipes! Here’s one of my favorites -thanks Merrill!) from home and professional cooks all over the world. I'm excited about our innovations in integrated advertising. Done well and transparently, absolutely this can serve both reader and brand. I'm excited about all things commerce. Food52 has in their short history already introduced many small producers to the Food52 audience, invented products, and collaborated with great partners. And we're figuring out how to bring all these things together on the page for our readers.
More broadly, I’m excited at bringing together the ecosystem both on our site and in the real world: food growers, makers of products, cooks and eaters. When you build a brand that matters to people, you can develop deeper relationships. And you can introduce folks to all sorts of great products and services far beyond the banner ad. But this also means being stewards of this community. While growing our company, we will need to ignore the lure of some short term media crack revenue to get there.
This is the digital media puzzle that has not yet been solved. Is this even really just “media” if we can leap off the browser and develop these relationships in the real world? This is the giant opportunity that we and many in other verticals are pursuing. (h/t @rafat!)
Sure, there’s another model for digital media, and really it’s been pretty well-baked at this point: huge scale, smart/fast/social content, lots of low cpm banners, a handful of big brand integrated buys and voila, you have a reliable chance of making a big, profitable media business. I was on board at Business Insider during some of their fantastic journey. Not to say this is easy or simple but generally the code has been cracked by them and others.
Can there be another way? I think so. For me, this deep dive into a “niche” space feels like the next frontier in building not just a giant business, but a great one, which is why I politely asked Amanda and Merrill if they would make some room in the sidecar.
