Trends in publishing

[ScipioX]

In the last 3 years there happened a lot in online publishing. New magazines like lifehack, upworthy, viral nova revolutionized the publishing business.

Not only got these website within up to 2 years 5 Million unique+ visitors, they also changed the art of writing in the internet. Viralnova and Upworth through headlines, lifehack through media. Even the monetization changed and Upworthy realized a new trend, that simple ad-showing business will die and ads have to be more sutil (sponsored posts).

Even old media like the huffingtonpost started spamming and recurating content, instead of focusing on old-school journalism.

Unfortunately there are many sad parts: If I research a topic I only find main stream articles that don't go into deepth anymore. The physics nerd that publishes amazing and analytical content got replaced by the newest gawker article.

And sites with (from my point of view) trash content like about.com and webmd.com are still big in business. I saw them dying already 2 years ago but it never happened. The content of this huge websites is basically the same. And their backlinks come mainly from PR and an existing brand. Nobody would like out to an about.com article if it wouldn't be about.com .

Newcomers have a tough job: SEO for 2014+ seems to me consisting out of getting covered in one of these big magazines. Do you agree?

Will this trend continue? What adjustments did you make for your own business? I started to adapt headlines slightly and hired a designer who just creates illustrations related our articles. I also noticed that you cannot build sites about small niche topics anymore, everything has to go big. More categories, more mainstream. What are your thoughts?

[DennisSeymour]

Well that is that trend but it's just like back then when they said niche sites are dead and everyone should build "authority sites" - it's the same thing, just with faster and more aggressive marketing/content team.

So yeah, the trend will continue as social gets more popular until it gets really, really overboard and social sites will just launch another algorithm to clear out the lower quality ones. Either way, getting links from them = win. Imagine all the new users you can sign up from the referral traffic alone. The links you will get from being featured again is a bonus.

Good luck!