Column: It's Hard Out There For a Publisher

Conventional wisdom says that entrepreneurs who start a Web-based business will do so with VC money. Read enough stories of Internet ventures that enjoy lucrative exits in the millions (in some cases billions) of dollars, and it’s easy to assume that the only path to success is to begin by securing deals with investors who are far less interested in helping a start-up build a substantial brand as they are in realizing a return as quickly as possible.  Bootstrapping simply isn’t sexy anymore. But for many start-up publishers, bootstrapping is a way of life, and VC money isn’t an option. According to angel investor David S. Rose, the success rate of entrepreneurs who chase down VC or angel funding is about 1 in 500.  Of the rest, some will give up, leaving a persistent majority to build their businesses from behind the financial eight ball.  For online publishers, this can be a particularly daunting task. Let’s forget any money needed for technology build-outs (off-the-shelf CMS products can keep these costs to a minimum), and the development of content. The generation of revenue alone can create too high a hurdle to overcome. A VC-backed online publisher can take the time to build a large organic audience; a bootstrapping one doesn’t have that same luxury. The basics of how the online ad industry is structured and how marketers think about it has a lot to do with this. Even with digital spend growing, online advertising is viewed by many marketing directors as a second... Continue reading at 'AdWeek'

[ AdWeek | 2013-06-21 00:00:00 UTC ]

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