Both are definitely nice companies, just with completely different strategies.

I’m sure you have great and innovative ideas you are just waiting to test out; but likewise you are wise, thus you are going to take your time, and stick to what you know at first.

Obviously, both of them have great techniques within their models; so the natural instinct would be to take both of their business models and cram them together, and make a super model (wow, a play on words). And I am sure this would work…up until the moment it failed.

You would think billions of sites…great…high quality content…great. But how long can this high quality, and high quantity ratio maintain itself? Even on sites where you have others working along side of you, it would become hard to maintain this.

The decision is quality v. quantity, which is the reason you opened the doors to the 9rules Network to begging with right? If you have a bunch of individuals maintain their own website, or a handful of them. It is a lot easier to present a greater quantity of high quality sites; than it is with a double digit number trying to maintain damn near a triple digit amount of sites.

However, I personally prefer Gawker over WIN because the content is of a higher quality. And in the end, quality is more important that quantity. I could die tomorrow at the “quantity” (age of) 20, and would feel like I have lived a quality that far surpasses that. Applies the same way.

I think having the long tail is the model… some stuff towards the left of the tail gets a lot of traffic, and the stuff on the right of the big stuff gets higher CPM with less traffic.

at least that is the concept :-)

Odds: what are the odds of getting a site into the top 10%? Limited. What are the odds of getting 10 sites into the top 30%? Better.

Longevity: Tastes change. Writers grow stale. One hot property today may drop over time. The tail will always exist, and will only grow over time.

Potential for growth: As above, it comes down to math.

Of course, the two models are not mutually exclusive. Which is best ultimately comes down to the management abilities and tools of the network owners.

What I am curious about is if Engadget, Joystiq, and Autoblog, posted the same number of entries per day, how would their traffic compare to the “competition” over at Gawker?

As a tiny upstart, we could never compete with Engadget, etc.

That’s why we’re starting off with High Heels and Medical Privacy. Just random Long Tail niches.

So far, we’re doing alright. It just takes time.