With the possible exception of a few kinds of products—maybe toilet paper, shoes, and haircuts—your market is nowhere near “everyone in the US,” and even farther from “everyone in the world.”
When you go into business, you ignore the people who are least likely to buy your product. The number of people you ignore is much, much larger than the number of people you have or work to earn as customers.
As we move forward, the news business is increasingly a business to serve the news-enthusiast subset of the general population. Social pressures and scarcity of information used to twist the newspaper and cable news company business into a more ubiquitous product, but the internet and small news entrepreneurs have changed that.
People seems to have gone nuts with this idea of all these millions of people who want stuff (like news) for free. Screw ‘em. You’re a business. You’re only interested in the people who want news for money.
Eat Sleep Publish is a Seattle-based blog that explores the difficulties and opportunities currently facing the publishing industry. 
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
“Screw ‘em. You’re a business. You’re only interested in the people who want news for money.”
Yeah… all three of them.
Yes
There will even be different subset of news enthusiasts in politics, sports, whether…
Also what you say for the news paper is the same for all business.
As an example, when Microsoft (I see you’re in their area) want to get influence the community to smooth the new release of Windows 7, they should build different messaging strategies for
- the IT security community
- the Desktop computing community
- the mac community
…
Targeting upfront to me goes beyond ignoring the people that are unlikely to buy but also to adapt listening & engagement to the various communities that are in target
Best