Pajama Entrepreneur

Recently, I posted a series of articles on turning a blog into a media company — well, a small niche media company.

But if you want to hit the big time, i.e. building an online media business that rakes in $50 million+ in revenues, you’ll have to read two posts written by Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Venture Partners. Jeremy knows the media business — he’s been with Citysearch, InterActiveCorp and AOL. Now, as a partner in a venture capital firm, he sees a lot of startups and decides which ones to fund.

In the first post, Jeremy lists three ways to grow your online media business:

- create a site with broad reach (but you’ll need 50 billion pageviews per year); or

- create a site that targets a specific demographic group (you will need 10 billion pageviews per year); or

- create a site with endemic advertising opportunities (a site with a narrowly targeted audience; you will need 2.5 billion pageviews per year).

The article goes into further detail into comparable websites and RPMs (revenue per thousand impressions), so it’s a must read. It’s very difficult to build that kind of media business. I can tell you that Muniwireless, which is more of a B2B site for people who care about citywide Wi-Fi and wide-area wireless networking, will not get to $50 million in revenues barring another miracle.

In the second post, Jeremy explains why it IS difficult to build a $50 million business (click here to read).