BY ZACH MORTICE
Image courtesy of Land8: Landscape Architects Network.
The landscape architecture websites Land8 and Landscape Architects Network (LAN) have merged. The resulting media platform aims to add focus to original content creation while serving an international audience. ?We want to be the most visited website in landscape architecture,? says Matt Alcide, Land8?s majority owner.
LAN will largely dissolve into Land8 with the merger, as the Arlington, Virginia-based Land8 will absorb LAN?s original content, e-mail list, and Facebook audience.
The merger was initially announced in June. The new website will launch on August 21 under the name Land8: Landscape Architects Network. Both Alcide and Scott Renwick, LAN?s founder, declined to disclose the amount paid for LAN. Renwick started LAN on Facebook in 2010. It grew rapidly and organically, he says, with no marketing or PR push. Today, it has a Facebook audience of nearly 1.5 million.
Land8 received two million page views in the past year, Alcide says; LAN has generated six million page views annually. With the combined site, Alcide expects about eight million page views in the coming year.
Many of these will come from LAN?s international audience. Its stable of 40 volunteer landscape architect writers (also located around the globe) was another boon for Alcide. ?We plan to create as much original content as possible,? he says.
Though it began as a news aggregation effort by Renwick, LAN evolved into an original cont...