Think of this as Volume 14, Number 32 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.
More than 15 years after the Web was spun it is still filled with opportunity.
What marks many of today's opportunities is that they're not about machine work. Machine work is the low-hanging fruit of the Web. Machine work has an immense profit margin, and incredibly low costs.
Google does machine work. Its success proved that, when machines face man online, machines are going to win. Yahoo was, originally, a directory, and invested heavily in sites like Geocities and Broadcast.com which required human work to fill them with stuff. Google, meanwhile, invested in machines, in software to parse the Web in various ways, and proved that's the way to the greatest profit.
This does not mean people have no place. It just means profit margins aren't quite as fat.
I have written many times here about the opportunities in my own field, journalism. Many of them still remain. The way to approach them, as always, is from the business side, defining an under-served market, place or lifestyle for which you have passion (and about which you have some knowledge), then organizing that market, and finally offering sellers the chance to meet buyers through entertaining editorial.
This is CNN's real problem. It has nothing to do with what the yahoos who argue about "journalism's failures" think. The channel never really defined its audience, its target market. Fox did. MSNBC (finally) did. So did dozens of other cable success stories. CNN never did -- they said they were a news station, and above all that. Bullshit. No one is above all that.
Let their failure be your guide in your journalism endeavors. And now with no further ado, some new niches for you to profitably explore:
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