A niche news site is a website or app that covers one subject in depth, such as cricket, health or electric vehicles, for readers who share that interest. It is also called a specialist news site, or a vertical publisher. A general newspaper covers everything for everyone. A niche site covers one thing for the people who care most about it.
Why does this work as a business? Because advertisers pay more to reach readers with a known interest. A company that makes cricket bats wants cricket fans. A maker of electric scooters wants people who read about electric vehicles. A general news site cannot promise either audience so precisely.
Consider a cricket site during an IPL match in Chennai. An office worker in Chandigarh cannot watch the match, so he keeps the site open on his phone. After every ball, the page updates the score and adds a line of commentary. The score does not come from a reporter typing it. It comes from a sports data feed. A scorer at the ground records each ball, and the feed sends it to the site within a second or two. The site's writers add the commentary in their newsroom CMS. At the end of the match, they publish a match report, the scorecard and the highlights.
The page also carries ads. Many of them are chosen by a contextual ad network, which reads the page and matches it with ads about cricket, such as a sports shoe or a fantasy sports app. It does not need to know who the reader is. This is called contextual advertising, and it matters more now that browsers block third-party cookies.
Most of the site's readers arrive from search. Someone searches for a player's batting average, or tonight's match time, and lands on the site. So the site writes each page to answer one such question. But search engines now often show the answer themselves, which is called zero-click search. So niche sites also build their own apps and alerts, to bring readers back directly.
Some niche sites sell a second product: data about their readers' interests. Take a site that covers business software. It can see which companies' employees are reading about, say, cloud security this week. It sells this information as intent data to companies that sell cloud security. Their sales teams use it to decide whom to call first.