Skip to main content

Tuesday, March 3, 2020

With over 25,000 legal columnists in the form of legal bloggers, LexBlog is no doubt in the the publishing business.

Our business model has never been around subscriptions, advertising or, God-forbid, charging people to distribute their content. Our business model has always been licensing publishing software.

A blog publishing platform, a portal platform for syndication and a ‘spot’ publishing solution for publishing ‘into’ LexBlog and onto our syndication partners. All in a SaaS model, where our software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted.

Turns out, per a a piece on media trends at Axios, the business of licensing publishing software is becoming increasingly competitive as more digital publishers look to raise money and develop more content management software and technology products.

From Axios:

  • Minute Media, a holding group that owns digital sports and entertainment websites like The Players’ Tribune and The Big Lead, announced Wednesday that it has raised $40 million in venture capital on a post-money valuation is more than $500 million, most of which will be used to expand its business by selling publishing software as a service.
  • Many modern media companies have built some sort of tech product, mostly publishing software, to license to other companies. Today, there are many companies that offer different publishing solutions.
    • The Washington Post created Arc, which is licensed to dozens of publishers, from small weekly publications to The Boston Globe.
    • Vox Media sells a suite of tech products ranging from its content management system, Chorus, to Coral, an open-source comments publishing platform that it acquired from the Mozilla Foundation last year. It also acquired a content management business called Clay when it bought New York Media last year.
    • Axios is reportedly looking to sell a new CMS-type of service to big companies, per Business Insider.
    • Hearst Media licenses MediaOS, a proprietary content management system that also serves as a data analytics platform.

    Though, per Axios, most have not been able to grow their non-media businesses to deliver on the promise of tech-style scale, LexBlog is doing so.

    As any entrepreneur will tell you, one never feels secure, LexBlog is scaling with technology, processes and software. With a small and nimble team, we’re running over 1,000 niche publications, and growing on our publishing software and aggregating and curating content from over 25,000 citizen publishers – legal publishers/bloggers.

    Talking to another publishing partner today, discussing our model, he said I’m starting to see it, you’re in the “mechanics” of publishing, and licensing the software to support it.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

LexBlog Con Can Provide Legal Companies and Law Firms an Opportunity to Connect With Influencers

Imagine a “LexBlog Con” where leading legal brands from startups to traditional larger players to law firms are offered the opportunity to connect with legal bloggers. After all, legal bloggers are quickly supplanting reporters and traditional media as the influencers of our legal community. From a blogger attendee, today, at BlogHer19 in Brooklyn. Day 1 of @BlogHer was wonderful. So many amazing brands to connect with #blogher19 #blogherpro #blogherlife #blogherstyle #blogherhealth19 #womenslifestyle #lifestyleblogger #lifestyleblog pic.twitter.com/IIcVrg9apz — Mademoiselle Skinner (@guestlistblog) September 18, 2019 There may not be a better way for legal industry companies to connect with the biggest influencers in legal than a conference of legal bloggers, ala LexBlog Con. LexBlog Con could start as simple as BlogHer did years ago and, as we had discussed for this last year, as a larger meetup of legal bloggers for a day of blogger education and networking. But ...
1 comment
Read more

Legal Blogs as a Community, Worldwide – by Country, by State, by Town and by Niche

Conceptualizing legal blogs, worldwide, as a community makes it easier to conceptualize the network of information these bloggers are creating, the positive impact they are having and how LexBlog can work on a goal that is much bigger than itself – a worldwide legal blog community, including every legal blog. This from an interview with Geo-Cities co-founder, David Bohnett, who was struggling with a way to describe the Internet. “ And one day in 1994, it just came to him. His hosting site didn’t need a technological innovation. It needed a conceptual one. Users needed a new way of navigating the web. So he sketched out a plan to make his website feel more like a real neighborhood. ” Geo-Cities was an Internet company creating websites. “Communities” were easy to understand as a place you live or go to. “GeoCities was creating these communities and then conceptualizing them as places you could go as neighborhoods on the net. So you could be a citizen of a country, and you could th...
Post a Comment
Read more

Manav Monga, Co-Founder of Heymarket, on Enterprise Applications, and Integrating with Clio

Kevin speaking with Manav Monga, co-founder of Heymarket , a Launch // Code finalist for the $100,000 grand prize awarded by Clio. Manav previously co-founded Manymoon, a social productivity app acquired by SalesForce.com in 2011. 
Post a Comment
Read more