[Throwaway90283]

Why is it surprising?

It's faster and cheaper to write clickbait articles, and they have a wider appeal. People are much more likely to click and share something with the name, 'What Disney character are you?' or 'Top 10 reasons you should start going out on Tuesday nights', compared to anything on Gigaom. It takes a lot of time to write proper articles, to check the facts, to follow up with sources, and to maintain a respectable reputation.

I'm sure they could trim the fat, and maintain a small group of dedicated writers, pay the bills and make a living. However, they raised quite a bit of money, so they kind of need to go big or die at this point, and going big is not easy for the reasons I mentioned above.

[toni]

The kind of people paying for Janes.com or AviationWeek can also get all their news for free from MilitaryNews.com or such, but still, these sites continue to flourish and they are only growing because having an AviationWeek subscription is a "status". The kind of niche that was reading the old, industry-centric GigaOm would have no problem paying for such a subscription.

[dagw]

The huge difference is that I imagine that the vast majority of people subscribing to Janes don't do it with their own money, and as such aren't very price sensitive. I imagine that mosy people subscribing to GigaOm are almost certainly doing it with their own money.

Also IHS (the people who publish Janes) have a whole host of other products and well as consulting services, so they can easily afford to run Janes.com at a small loss as part of their marketing budget.

[mtbcoder]

> I'm sure they could trim the fat

Indeed, the article mentions they were paying for office space in both Manhattan and San Francisco.