On May 28th Om Malik unleashed GigaOm Pro to the world. A subscription-only business, it charges users a flat yearly fee of $79 dollars to access a large and growing library of research and analysis. This content stream of, in their words, “Breifings, Notes, Long Views, Quarterly Wrap Ups, Weekly Updates, and Curated Links,” is constantly being reviewed, updated, and expanded. Given that the content never stops, $79 dollars for a year was deemed a more than fair price at launch.
That price has been maintained by the service thus far, now several months into the project. This has allowed the service to expand quickly to “include a larger number of people so we can foster stronger conversations within the new site” (source). But the question that everyone is asking, and no one seems to know the answer to, is how the service is fairing. I was fortunate enough to be linked up with Michael Wolf by Om Malik and ask him some questions.
Wolf made it plain that normal GigaOm readers were quick to make the jump from normal to Pro service. The “mental leap” was quite short, and it seemed that readers understood the truism that “analysts are blogging and bloggers are doing analysis.” It was suspected at launch by the technology community at large that perhaps people would have a hard time making the jump from a blog reporting news to paying a subsidiary of that publication for the analysis that they usually get from services such as Gartner. A combination of strong branding and low pricing seems to have helped people over the barrier.
I asked, knowing the answer would be no, for revenue and user data; I got what I expected. However, Wolf did state that GigaOm Pro is exceeding internal expectations. We can only gleam from this that GigaOm remains fully behind the project. I assume that these internal projections were the same ones that were shown to investors pre-investment. Happy investors are investors of overpreforming companies. It would seem at least from this that the larger GigaOm network will be in good health for the coming year.
For those that have not subscribed to GigaOm Pro, it is interesting to note that they do not rely on their in-house staff for much of their content. This is assumed to be the reason for their taking of investment: namely to cover their analyst costs. They have a network of analysts that cover specific areas on a recurring basis. This, they claim, is one of the largest value adds of the service. The combination of in-house editorial view points and external input is something that Wolf called a “great deal.”
It would seem, from the sparse data from the GigaOm Pro team and overservations around the Twitter and blog worlds that GigaOm Pro is in fact doing well. But, given the general opacity in the release of hard data, I garner that it is not a runaway success. What does this mean? That it is possible for blogs to move upscale. There is value in the blogging brand, and enough to expand past merely a blog, to more in-depth reporting on the trends behind the news.
Of course, this is no small news to the technology blogging community, this technology blogger included.
We will continue to track GigaOm Pro in the coming months carefully. If you are a subscriber to GigaOm Pro, we would love to talk to you and your experiences.
