What happens when you’ve made a business out of publishing hundreds and hundreds of niche blogs? b5Media, a Toronto based startup that has taken funding in the range of US$2-million co-lead by Brightspark Ventures and J. L. Albright Venture Partners, is the owner of a vast amount of posts and articles on a few dozen subjects and finding new ways to capitalize on that asset can get tough.
Today, b5 is taking a leap and is launching Spekked. The project is labeled “Beta”, which either means that the technology is young (it’s an aggregator of other b5media blogs, all based on one common subject), or it means the entire business idea is being tested. My guess is that it is a combination of both.
As any startup begins to accumulate assets, it is critical to put them to good use. Like the guys at AideRSS, who previewed a set of tools at Democamp which uses their existing data, b5 is starting to zero in on larger segments of their market by combining many products (in this case, content) in to one re-focused stream which will have a much broader appeal. Spekked will also act as a funnel in to b5’s deeper offerings in that particular category.
The challenge for this project will be to avoid losing readers who may stop reading 5 regular b5media blogs and instead just tune in to the one aggregated blog.
If this works, you can bet there will be a lot of other branded combination blogs from b5 to come.
We are working on a profile of b5media, which we hope to post soon.