July 22, 2003
Blog Entry

Patrick Spain Disses KeepMedia

SUMMARY: No summary available.
Weird press release of the day: Patrick Spain, CEO Alacritude whose business is based on reselling content aggregated by a separate company, just had his PR people send me a pitch asking if I'd like to interview him on how stupid his new competitors are. It's not only ungentlemanly, it's also kinda dumb because it draws my attention to said competitors and gets them ink.

Anyway, here's the quote the PR folks suggest I use if I don't have time to interview Spain personally:

Said Spain: "The KeepMedia business model is flawed. I know because I bought a company _ eLibrary _with the same business model and we are changing it as quickly as we can.... We have some 40,000 subscribers who access an archive of 17 million articles from consumer, business and industry publications. If we weren't developing new products, we would be a nice, profitable little company with limited growth prospects."

People, including us, who focus their long-term online business on selling a selection of content will fail. What people want is single point of access to all online content, whether free or paid, utilizing compelling tools to turn that content into useful and actionable answers for their personal or business needs."

I guess nobody ever told Spain about the guy who runs Pipefitters.com -- over $1 million per year sold of a tightly niched selection of content.

Thing is, some content buyers prefer to buy from boutique specialists, even if it is all available at a megastore elsewhere. And boutiques can be very profitable because you can focus marketing spend.

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