Help wanted: TechnicallyPhilly's push for profit
Our favorite local independent tech news website, supported by its founders' news habit, is looking to sell ads, sign up members, and organize a job board to pay its way
TechnicallyPhilly is a daily menu of tech-related and emerging-company information posted by Brian James Kirk, Sean Blanda and Christopher Wink, three recent Temple grads who support their online-news habit with their parttime writing gigs. HQ is upstairs in an airy ex-Sandoz drug warehouse-turned-storage units/artist studios/recent-college-grad flophouse, in a rowhouse-and-factory block of East Tioga Street up in Harrowgate.
The trio wants to make http://TechnicallyPhilly.com a paying gig. Wink doesn't think there's enough online advertising to go around, he told me over the kitchen table/command post. But it takes cash to make cash. So last week they posted an ad for a Commission-Based Ad-Sales Rep as "the next step in creating a sustainable news product."
The goal, Wink told me, is to move from display ads to "a jobs board we have in development, e-commerce, events and some other smaller pieces, leading to a membership structure" later this year.
The Inquirer published PhillyTech, magazine and Website, during the dot.com boom, and folded it when ads got scarce. I like the TechnicallyPhilly gang's goal of finding more diverse, creative, community-oriented revenue streams. So how's that job search? "We got just a handful of inquiries - less than seven... in the first day," Wink told me yesterday. "We saw a lot of traffic, so we suspect it's being passed around." Go get 'em.