I received an e-mail the other day from the CEO of a small RFID firm in Europe. He said that while he appreciated all of the great content on RFID Journal‘s Web site, “my regret is that your focus is only on big companies.”
I took exception to this—big time. RFID Journal invests an enormous amount of money to write, edit and post articles regarding radio frequency identification. Our focus, from day 1, has always been to educate end users about how this technology, in all of its forms, can be used to improve the way companies do business.
When our editors see a press release or receive a pitch from a PR person, they don’t know how much that vendor has spent with us in the year prior. They don’t ask, either—and if they did, I wouldn’t tell them. They evaluate news based on how much the information will benefit end users and our broader audience, including consultants, systems integrators, vendors, academics and others.
I’ve never performed an analysis, but I would bet the majority of the vendors mentioned in our articles never advertise with us, so they benefit directly from our investment and hard work for free. Our articles also educate the 1 million people who visit our site annually, and this benefits everyone involved in the RFID industry.
We also provide numerous ways that any RFID company can promote itself on our site for free. Vendors can post comments in response to bulletin-board and blog postings, respond to Ask the Experts questions, submit a white paper to our white-paper library, add their customer deployments to our RFID Map, or write an Expert View. And yet, I’m astonished at how few actually take advantage of these opportunities.
Like all publishers, we have a limited inventory of advertising positions, and we cannot give up advertising revenue from our best customers in order to promote companies that provide us with much less revenue. No company can do that. But we do strive to serve the entire RFID industry, and I think we do a better job than almost any other trade publication out there.
Mark Roberti is the founder and editor of RFID Journal. If you would like to comment on this article, click on the link below. To read more of Mark’s opinions, visit the RFID Journal Blog or click here.