I think the big downfall for independent publishers is the difficulty in building a community around their content, especially in the wake of things like Twitter and Facebook Pages, which have the effect of decentralizing communities away from content. It’s easier to latch onto something else. One day, a reader noted to me that I should look at Tumblr, saying that my content would be a good fit there. So, after playing with a few ideas, I decided to custom-build a Tumblr theme and to see what happened. We ran both for about four or five months. Within a couple months, it became clear that two things were happening: 1) It was starting to take off (roughly 15,000 followers in a year), and 2) A strong news-oriented community was building up on Tumblr. By February, it was clear the WordPress page wasn’t where the action was happening, so we moved to Tumblr fully and haven’t looked back.

From a really nice Interview with Ernie Smith from ShortFormBlog; see the whole thing here

Notes

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