Background
After Oracle bought Sun, I pivoted and now publish for a general IT audience.
Over those years, I have grown the subscriber base of my newsletters to over 40k people worldwide. Many of those people have been subscribers for many years and their careers have advanced. I can think of one Solaris SysAdmin who eventually became the CIO of his organization.
Mine is a very attractive audience of senior IT professionals and I am now exploring ways to generate revenue without loosing them. My publications have always avoided advertising. I have instead developed a model of tracking the behavior of the crowd to select the most popular articles. I offer a managed IT newsletter service with those most popular articles.
My publishing technology has some very nice features. In particular, each subscriber is able to control which sections are included in their newsletter. So a reader who is not interested in IoT can disable the IoT section.
That allows me to roll out new sections, enabled by default, and the audience can disable the ones they don’t want. This year I have launched new sections including: Blockchain, ERP, CRM, BI, Compliance.
The new product I am working on is a form of what’s called Native Advertising. I can create a section for a vendor and place articles in that section from that vendor. I do this already for Red Hat. Whenever they issue a press release, I process that into an article in the Red Hat News section. Those articles look and feel like the rest of the publication and each reader can stop unwanted sections from appearing in future newsletters sent to them.
You can see the Red Hat News section on this web site: https://redhat.it-news-and-events.info
You will see how the Red Hat News is a first class sections and the articles look like the articles in the rest of the publication.
I now want to offer sponsored news sections to other companies.
A side effect of having a sponsored news section for your firm going out to my global audience, is that I can also spin up a custom publication for you (like the Red Hat one above). You can add your contacts and they will get a weekly newsletter with your news section plus the crowd selected articles.
For those organization who sell their product or service through resellers (or channel partners), I can produce a customer newsletter for each reseller with the organization’s News section.
If you are interested in this new service, please let me know.
IT Newsletters As A Service 