How I’m dealing with low-traffic news niches

I was finally able to get a few more news sites up and running (yay!) and after about 10 minutes of patting myself on the back, I realized that I kind of had a problem. Two of the sites, Tech Fantastic and the Gamer Collective, were generating quite a few more news items than the others (Agile Fantastic and Ruby Fantastic) since, naturally, their target audience and overall niche is quite large. There many news sources in the tech and gamer spaces and not really so many in the agile and ruby space.

After a few days, the difference between the sites was even more glaring. The front pages for Tech Fantastic and the Gamer Collective were changing throughout the day, while the front pages for the agile and ruby site hadn’t moved an inch. Ouch.

On one hand, that might not be a bad thing. The way the engine works, it’s picky about what news to show by default and with it being so picky, maybe it would help cutback on the noise and only show the most recent and pertinent news. That sounds all well and good, but I was a bit worried about people losing interest (myself included).

So what I decided to do was to throw posts from sites that had more than a certain threshold of credibility into the front page mix. My thinking was, “this sites are already established as being relevant to their niches (as determined by our system), so more often than not, their posts would most likely be noteworthy…what the heck”.

If you look at Ruby Fantastic and Agile Fantastic, you’ll see that they have more news items that don’t have any related stories, as compared to Tech Fantastic and the Gamer Collective, and those stories are still quite relevant. Now, sure when something popular hits in one of those industries, you’ll see more activity, but for now, I think this is a pretty good way to stay even more up to date in these respective niches. What do you think?