Curbed Corners the Real Estate Porn Audience
From a personal blog with witty commentary on New York City’s East Side happenings to a blog network that claims over 1.5 millions views per month, Curbed has gone a long way since its inception.
Founder Lockhart Steele developed Curbed New York, a blog about real estate developer showdowns, apartment rentals, purchases and “anything a New Yorker might do with square footage, a lease, and a dream.” With separate sites such as Eater for food news, Racked for the latest in shopping, and Gridskipper for travelers, the network hopes “to tell the story of the cities it covers from the pavement on up.”
The posts range from “real estate porn” — photos of lavishly furnished apartments; to links from news stories about gun violence and flash floods. Combine that with how-to-posts for new rentals and buyers and a well-regarded online marketplace with listings as nicely-presented as those on the main site, Curbed has moved beyond real estate to cover anything you might talk to a neighbor about.
“The site takes as its premise that all conversations in New York eventually lead back around to real estate, apartments and neighborhoods,” Steele explained to a reporter in 2004. Curbed takes real estate reporting to the Internet-era, and it’s been so successful that business journalism professor Chris Roush pointed to it as a sign that media sites should blog their real estate coverage.
Curbed also publishes gossip, and Steele’s background as the editorial director of Gawker media comes as no surprise from Curbed’s layout and witty, often snarky voice. The site succeeds as yet another alternative to the hyper local sites — rather than go deep with a dedicated audience, Curbed expands its horizons with photo galleries that readers might click through even if they don’t live in those areas. That allows them to pursue much greater profits by attracting readers who want luxury content and advertising from national brands with deeper pockets than local businesses.
Even if Curbed readers can’t afford $20 million-dollar homes, they’ll keep reading. I’m guessing people read Robb Report or interior design catalogs for the same reason, and Steele seems to think so himself.
“I make this joke that blogs exist because people are bored at work — which is to say people with white collar jobs and big screens to stare at,” he said to a New York Times reporter in 2010. Looks like there are plenty of those.
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