Of course the higher-ups want to see more traffic and more ad revenue. That’s what business is all about. But I’ve run Massively for almost 3 years now and I’ve never ever been approached by anyone at AOL corporate telling me how to run the site. They know that we fill a niche and they realize that we know what we’re doing. They respect the fact that we know how to run the site better than they ever would (except ad sales, because I don’t want any part of that).

The funny thing about blogging for money is that it really couldn’t be done without an initial support infrastructure. Any blogger who has ever tried to fund their WordPress site through Google Ads could tell you that a few dollars a month in ad revenue isn’t enough to quit your day job over. AOL allows sites like Massively and Joystiq to be around, doing what they do best. If you think about it, AOL is basically just buying a piece of trending culture and throwing some ads on it for extra revenue. They don’t want to direct or change that trending culture; they merely want to make some money off the top.

So no, we were never ordered to write specifically for traffic numbers. We were never told to hit an average of 7k hits per post and Arianna Huffington isn’t telling me how to tank a mob

On the one hand you have AOL with Joystiq, Massively and WoW Insider. All of these are heavily journalism-based, producing quality articles on a regular basis.

On the other hand you have Curse and ZAM with a heavy mix of user-generated content (addons, data feeds, wikis), news (MMO-C) and community sites (Arena Junkes etc).

Out in the middle you have MMORPG.com, covering every single MMO around.

How will things pan out?

I think that Warcraft is an oddity rather than a norm, purely because of how popular the game is. I think that over time the content will get absorbed into Massively as WoW’s popularity fades.

I also think that Curse could really corner the MMO content market if they put some work into turning Curse.com into more of a super-site, containing feeds from all the major community sites they run and hiring some columnists to write about the general MMO market and help collate rudimentary MMO data.

Finally, I reckon MMORPG will either get bought out by AOL or Curse (more likely Curse).

This looks like one of those producer/consumer issues to me. As a consumer, I don’t much care who my provider is, I just want uninterrupted supply.

If the names on the shareholder report change, that makes no difference to me. If I have to go to a new supplier, that’s a minor, temporary inconvenience, but so long as the new supply is commensurate with the old, then I really don’t care about the change of pipe.

If what Massively provides is of sufficient interest, then if AOL/HuffPo decides they don’t want Massively, someone else will pick up that content.

Hope that helps!

I know nothing on the blogging model that Massively and WoW Insider use, but I think Massively is a lot less popular if you go by how many hits I get when I’m linked from there. And $20 per article sounds high to me, I’d be guessing more like 2c per word (which is what pen and paper games used to pay new writers, experienced writers could get higher but it still was a niche.)

If I were running Massively, I suspect I’d be looking to shift over to including facebook games or else start a new blog called Social Gaming Insider or somesuch to drum up more hits. It’s also possibly not that huge even from game blogging standards, the big WoW blogs can easily get upwards of 10k hits per post but for that you’d probably be posting “tactics for spec X of class Y on boss fight Z” to get the search engine hits and also be one of the top blogs for your chosen class. I’m sure some of the top gold making blogs do well also.

I’d be really interested to find out more about their statistics and revenue though. I honestly don’t know how they make profit or if they even do. I mean, they pay what $20 per article? And post something like 20 articles a day? That’s $400 outlay per day or $12,000 per month before you even take into account operating costs. Given how passively Massively and WoW Insider advertise and the nature of the stuff they advertise, I’d be incredibly surprised if aren’t making a loss every month.

I’d love to hear someone at these sites on how their business model works because I’m very curious. It seems to something no one wants to talk about though

As for the leak from AOL, that’s the exact sort of thing that puts me off a lot of a lot of Internet news sites. Writing specifically to generate traffic and cash by following a set of rules can often result in a lot of pretty rubbish and uninteresting content. I can’t help but prefer the honesty, opinion and personality of a site like RPS. I’d also be willing to subscribe to decent, gated content and pay a couple bucks a month to keep it going.

7000 will be an average so they’ll probably makes sure to put in a few high hit generating pieces of rubbish.

“Should there be a Lesbian Vampire Killers mmo?” would generate 7000 hits regardless of what they wrote after it. Most might be people looking for something entirely different but a hit’s a hit, right?

The main threats to Massively I think are more along the lines of a Bad Management decision/Gawker-esque escapade – something that would likely effect WoW Insider as well. AOL has something of a history of those so I’d be worried for the Joystiq family of blogs in general.