LuLa's a pay site now, and it certainly appears that the principals want to make it a business. There's some ads and things generating money, probably less and less of it as the water of the internet fills with blood. There's followon business in workshops. Evidently these are not adequate, and the decision was made to add a $12/year fee for the front page content.
None of this is news, of course. It feels to me like the site needs to pull several thousand subscribers for this to make sense, though. 10,000 subscribers might even be enough to operate LuLa as a sort of part-time business. Given the other revenue streams, let's throw 5,000 out there as a sort of back-of-the-envelope target.
That's 5,000 subscribers, parting with filthy lucre. A couple dozen blustery loyalists isn't pulling the train. This isn't a charity project funded by a cadre of the Michael's personal pals. This is pretty real.
What I'm seeing on the front page is pretty mixed.
Tutorials for beginners to panorama stitching and articles about how the best camera is the one with the most pixels, that's non Canon? This is commodity content. I can find this by the double handful on the internet. As the market is wont to do, it has set a price for commodity photographic content, and that price is not $12/year. It is Zero Dollars.
This leaves content that is distinctive and interesting, that is specific to LuLa, that is unique.
The stuff on print has some promise. There's plenty of stuff out there on printing, but it's haphazard and I suspect mostly wrong. So, there's an opportunity here.
Access to interesting people. The videos with Mr. Neil have promise. Again, an opportunity here, to use the LuLa team's personal connections and reputations to get this kind of access, and turn it in to distinctive interesting content.
The urge to turn this kind of distinctive and interesting content into Tutorials For Beginners, into Ten Quick Tips, needs to be fought. One might say "well, we need to make our content broadly accessible" but in reality what you're doing is converting distinctive and unique content, valuable content, into that same Zero Dollar Valued commodity content.
5,000 subscribers, even 50,000 subscribers, is a real market, a real business. But it's not that big. It's a niche. LuLa can afford to be kind of nichey in content. You needn't try to compete with PetaPixel, and to try is a terrible idea. There's already a PetaPixel.
