Molly McHugh wrote: There are a ton of 'niche' topic/location writers that are joining the ranks of Examiner.com, blogforusforfree.com, etc. that are - and more so in the years to come until these sweatshops close up - competing for page views with the independent publisher.
Molly, it doesn't matter if they're "niche writers"; the point is that they're writing short, shallow "long-tail" filler articles that don't compete with in-depth coverage. In other words, Examiner.com and Suite101.com aren't competing with Lonelyplanet.com or Frommers.com or Europeforvisitors.com; they're competing with other sites of the same kind, and (to a lesser degree) with broad-but-shallow "user-generated content" sites like TripAdvisor.
Many are getting more savy about key words, meta tags, etc. and cover larger areas of content regardless of what is actually written in the piece and just the sheer numbers of players in the game means an independent niche website owner has a HUGE uphill battle to gain ANY type of revenue from a new site. Two to five years ago, different story but at the moment I don´t see it being a viable business option like you do. Editorial freedom yes, income other than a trickle, no.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and I can assure you that some author-publishers are eating pretty well these days--even in the current publishing recession. (And by the way, I don't think I've ever seen an Examiner article in the top 10 Google search results for the travel keyphrases that I follow. Sites like Examiner.com may get a lot of traffic in the aggregate, because they have millions of pages that they've acquired for peanuts from writers who don't know any better or are "in it for the trips," but their traffic on individual articles appears to be almost nil.)