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December 19, 2012

The Case for Evergreen Content: Some Things, Justin, are All-Excellent All The Time.

Ever wonder why more people on the Internet don't post things that can be posted over and over again? Or useful items that can just stay posted and put? Like "evergreen" articles. Rather than have to post, say, time-sensitive blog pieces every single day like "The Mood of the Midwest: What Joe Biden Probably Meant Last Night in Indianapolis". We used to, too--about 5 years ago. If you are with us so far, see "Morning Advantage: Dear Internet, I Quit" at the Harvard Business Review Blog Network and "Buffeted by the Web, but Now Riding It" in the New York Times. Both are about Brian Lam and The Wirecutter. Excerpt from the NYT article:

“I was tired of doing posts that were obsolete three hours after I wrote them,” Mr. Lam said. “I wanted evergreen content that didn’t have to be updated constantly in order to hunt traffic. I wanted to publish things that were useful.”

He bootstrapped the site, spurning outside investment. “If you take the money, you have to pony up in terms of scale, and I don’t want to do that,” he said.

The clean, simple interface, without the clutter of news, is a tiny business; it has fewer than 350,000 unique visitors a month at a time when ad buyers are not much interested in anything less than 20 million.

Tunturisopuli_Lemmus_Lemmus.jpg
Above: Valiant lemming who decided to go in a different direction.

Posted by JD Hull at December 19, 2012 08:51 AM

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