Royal Anecdotes was one of the first three sites launched by Syntagma Media in October 2005. It has been our top traffic site consistently ever since, except when overtaken temporarily by its sister site, Aristocracy Anecdotes.

Now we are pleased to launch another in the line, Royal Marriage 2007, in response to the imminent engagement announcement of Prince William and Kate Middleton, scooped by Royal Anecdotes itself. The site will be part of our LifeTimes network magazine.

Royal Marriage 2007 will track the events, occasionally getting the scoops, and keeping you in touch with the ups and downs of the occasion.

Put it into your social diary for next year, and make sure your top hat is in good order.

Lots of juicy chatter around the zlogosphere* about portals and platforms right now. Even Dave Winer is confused so it’s got to be getting serious.

* zlogs are blogs that have outgrown the common or garden blogosphere.

Keith Teare at edgio thinks the big portals, like Yahoo and Google, will gradually retract back from their Himalayan heights to the great wodge in the middle, while the outer edge, comprising small to medium publishers, will become relatively more important. His touchstone is the reported $180,000/month made by TechCrunch.

Scott Karp, who wrote something similar a week ago, believes platforms are the new portals.

Well, it’s old ground here in the zlogosphere as I’ve been banging on about content platforms for quite a while. Mathew Ingram questions the terms used in this discussion. “It’s just the language that is making things difficult. What is a ‘gateway’ or a ‘portal’ or a ‘platform?’ ”

Well, for what it’s worth, here’s Zyntagma Syntagma’s definition of a content platform — or network magazine, as we call them : “A network magazine is a content platform that brings together a range of websites on multi-domains from the same network and which are of interest to a similar readership.”

So the platform is the total distributed inventory within the unit, defined and networked as a magazine, or some other term. The portal is the place where it’s promoted as a single entity. The platform is the whole, the portal is the front page and contents list, to use print terminology.

To clarify that, we have three content platforms and three portals where they receive their organization and package branding.

Scott’s suggested receipts of $180,000/month per platform would give us an annual income of $6.5 million.

Long live the zlogosphere.

Keith Teare has an interesting post over on the Edgio blog, De-portalization and Internet Revenues.

He’s basically saying that the giant portals, like Yahoo and Google will gradually flatten out — see his great mountain graphics — in favour of content platforms from smaller publishers. These will use techniques to drive and distribute traffic flows and collectively become much more important, relatively speaking, than the big players.

Publisher driven revenue models will increasingly replace middlemen. There will be no successful advertiser driven models in the foothills, only publisher centric models. Successful platform vendors will put the publisher at the center of the world in a sellers market for eyeballs. There will be more publishers able to make $180,000 a month [like TechCrunch].

Regular readers will know that this is a viewpoint I’ve been pushing here for some time. He continues :

“Smart [software] companies will (a) help content find traffic by enabling its distribution. (b) help users find content that is widely dispersed by providing great search. (c) help the publishers in the rising foothills maximize the value of their publications.”

I really couldn’t put it better. Our philosophy in a nutshell. Great news that Edgio is going to roll out some supporting products in coming weeks.

One to watch.

We’ve now completed our reorganization plans and will be implementing them across our three network magazines this weekend.

Basically, we are archiving some underperforming sites and we’ve let go eight wonderful one-site authors. This was a difficult decision, but they used up as much admin time as those with many more sites under their belts. With reducing the workload as the main objective, this was painful but necessary.

We have now stabilized to around 35 sites, plus the experimental ones under Syntagma Confidential. With my new contract there’s a distinct possibility of the big retail project going ahead under a different banner, and that will impact favourably on Syntagma too.

We’re now leaner, better organized and much more profitable than before. At the end of my one-year contract with a much larger outfit, Syntagma will be the best li’l network business on the Web.

You’d better believe it.

I’m going to be working with a large media company for the next year, and this will mean a change of shape for Syntagma as I’ll have less time to devote to it.

We haven’t decided on how to play it yet, but it’s possible we may reduce the number of magazines, and archive some sites.

A strong possibility of a tie-up between the two companies exists, but will unfold, or not, over time. I would prefer to keep Syntagma independent, but some offers just can’t be refused.

This is a very exciting time for us here at Syntagma Towers. One thing you can be certain of is that the network will emerge stronger and more professional than ever.

As I look through our stats for November, one thing is clear, they have increased threefold since the introduction of our network magazine format.

Although November was a good month overall, by interpolating a little, I’ve been able to calculate roughly the effects of the new organization.

Our top two sites have notched up over 50,000 unique visitors, and even the slower ones have more or less tripled their October performances.

The reason is fairly clear : with a more organized structure, traffic is moving along pathways not previously available, and flows from the centre are adding to the “own traffic” of each site.

Moreover, intersite traffic has increased substantially too. And while it’s not quite exponential, it’s still rather remarkable.

So, far December is following the same path, and while much can be put down to the Christmas spirit, the new network factor is accounting for the bulk of the improvements.

Syntagma Media is delighted to launch the latest in our financial series of information websites : On the Money, which will be part of our LifeTimes network magazine.

The site will cover what is usually called Macroeconomics, or fiscal and monetary trends.

Our authors are the Boston Bloggers, Andrea Paulsen, whose career is in insurance underwriting, and Clive Allen, who has a particular interest in the greenback.

On the Money supplements our two microeconomics sites : Money Finesse and The Money Blog, plus our eye on the consolidation of the world’s stock markets, LSE Latest.

That’s a question we all ask ourselves from time to time, especially in periods of transition.

Would I do anything differently with Syntagma Media if I knew what I know now?

The answer is pretty obvious : Yes, I’d go straight to where we’re going next without all the bits in between.

But life isn’t like that. We have to travel the long learning curve to get a rounded view of the basics and intermediates before we tackle the more complex areas.

So, where are we going next? I’m afraid I’m going to break the habit of a lifetime and stay partially dumb. Except …

This last week I’ve been reorganizing the inventory and the magazines — they will now have a more flexible content list. Where one site overlaps the readership of two mags, relevant posts will appear in each, for example. Syntagma will also appear in Phi.

As an interim measure, we’re cutting back on underperforming sites and merging similar sites that would do better together than apart. This will cut down on our admin and trim costs. We’re having a new general logo and a separate, initially-hidden, subset of sites, codenamed, Syntagma Confidential. And, no, these are not naughty sites, just experimental; the testbed of innovative ideas for the future.

The main bone of contention, though, has been the means of tackling the huge retail projects we still have in mind. In the light of the perceived — and actual — glass ceiling we’re grappling with to enter the upper echelons of this sector, I’m going to try out a smaller, less competitive, commercial sector in order to develop and attract the skills and infrastructure to tackle the Everest of retail mid-2007.

We’re also developing our growing inventory of new book serializations. Following Steve Newman’s continuing tour de force of the Hemingway serialization of his fictionalized biography of the author’s life, he’s now putting up his new Victorian crime novel, The Crime of the Crimea featuring the detective duo, Swann and Parker. This will be preceded by a juicy Christmas story : The Great Christmas Train Robbery, written exclusively for Syntagma readers. Watch out for this soon.

On another tack, we’ll be following the expected nuptials of Prince William to Kate Middleton on a separate, dedicated site. The huge tidal waves of traffic to our Royal Anecdotes offering, with the comments becoming a regular forum for every Royal fan and n*tc*se, tells us there’s a vast appetite for this subject out there. If every site in our network had the unique visitor stats of RA, we’d be close to the kind of traffic we need for a major breakthough in the biggest-ticket advertising.

But our main area of progress through 2007 will be in upgrading the backend technical side, plus unveiling a new template for our individual Wordpress websites. Small beer, perhaps, but necessary for our upcoming assault on mainstream media.

People always ask me why I’m so “obsessed” with advertising. The reason is simple : a content business lives by ad revenues alone. We don’t do subscriptions or direct sales (yet). Our entire stock of treasure comes from our advertisers, and those who click on Google Adsense.

It’s often not appreciated that professional content would virtually disappear from the internet were it not for advertising support. Yes, the big egos would still be there jostling for attention, but real writers would all but vanish.

So we value our advertisers past, present and still to come, and wish them a great December of sales, and, dare I say it, a very merry Christmas.

Something has been nagging away at me for months about the nature of online original content publishing. I’ve expressed it in many ways on this site, not the least in our conversion to a portalized, network magazine format.

At our end of the market — so-called blog networks — we are about a third of the way up the octave of scale … a bit above individual blogs, but below the aggregators and the mega-rich print publishers now streaming into the internet.

As Gurdjieff pointed out that’s a dangerous place to be because it’s where you hit the first half-interval in the octave, the project equivalent of Beecher’s Brook.

The initial rush to big blog networks was prompted by Weblogs Inc, both its ambition — to be a $10m business — and its eventual sale to AOL for a reported $25m. Did it ever get to a $10m valuation prior to the sale? I don’t think so.

Blog networks are publishers of original content. As I’ve been saying for a while, their scale and the distributed nature of their niches, make them more like online, atomized magazines, than any other comparison. And this places a glass ceiling above their expandability.

Recently Syntagma Media hit that ceiling with our wish to attract serious retail advertising by launching two massive network magazines, one in the US and the other in the UK. I’ve documented the problems in making that decision, here and here.

There are three choices for a network at the point we are :

1. Stick with the blogosphere and its useful, but small-scale rewards.
2. Scale up massively into a cut-throat market dominated by the giants of mainstream media.
3. Rely more on selling content directly, i.e. in print or eprint formats.

Syntagma has one foot in #1, another in #3, and waning ambitions in #2. At any rate diversification is the way forward.

Scott Karp has a great crack at understanding this conundrum on his blog, Publishing 2.0, today:

Can anyone think of a content business — meaning a company that produces original content — that has scaled dramatically in recent years? I can’t. Look at the businesses that have scaled — Google, MySpace, YouTube — all platforms for content, but not producers of content. Compare those to original content businesses like Weblogs, Inc., Gawker, TechCrunch, Paid Content — they are successful at their scale, but that scale is still tiny compared to the scale of the aggregation businesses. Even portals like AOL and Yahoo are much more aggregators of content than original producers of content.

That’s the essence of the problem I’ve been trying to articulate on Syntagma for most of this year. My friendly warnings to other owners seemingly going for broke, have been misinterpreted as “jabs”, or jealousy.

The Blog Herald

Now we hear that The Blog Herald has been sold by Matt Craven of BlogMedia Inc, now Problogging Inc, to follow the first route of relying on blog consultancy, mainly to Fortune 500 companies. Apart from the fact that only 3pc of F500 bigcos indulge in business blogging, it’s not easy to get access to these companies unless you have goldplated contacts within them.

The short golden age of the blog network is over. Does that mean that original content provision is over too? No, you just have to accept yourself as a small-to-medium business that will never attract the buyout checkbooks of a Google or a Yahoo.

Is that so bad? Not at all. It’s what the vast majority of businesses do all the time. Having once worked close to the boardroom of a major telecoms company, I would say : it’s a far, far better thing you do than facing Madame Guillotine twice a day.