Mantic Media

Mike Arrington recently posted on the trend of blogs accepting venture capital and how the big ad revenue and media attention blogs are receiving has changed the nature of the medium.

His observations are inline with my own, and are the reason I’m bearish on blogging for money.

Once a blog becomes a business the dynamics change. Rather than being about the flow of ideas and active discussion, it becomes about money and politics.

Each link out is an opportunity to brown nose a superior, or failing that, a visitor lost to a competitor. Content is tailored to maximize traffic and attract lucrative sponsors.

As cliques solidify and fear/resentment builds it gets harder to gain traction every day.

Another reason blogging stinks as a business is that it’s driven by talent. If you are the talent, then you can start off as solo act, bootstrap for the first couple years, and hopefully generate enough revenue to hire more talent. But forget about an exit.

Blogging is anti-entrepreneurial, in the sense that the blog founder (unless they can afford to hire top talent from the start) is inextricably tied to the business and the brand.

For economic reasons, the top players will eventually consolidate, either through acquisitions by big media companies or mergers where “the top talent band together in a company where they each have an equity stake”.

With this statement Arrington reveals his ambitions for the TechCrunch empire.

I started my first blog in November 2006 with hopes of developing a revenue generating machine. I was infatuated with the idea of escaping my day job, had aspirations as a writer, and a blog seemed like the perfect way to achieve both.

This worked out well. The blog became pretty popular and eventually I was able to generate some nice side income from it. But somewhere along the line the taste went sour. The blog wasn’t about the ideas and the writing. It was about traffic and ads and money money MONEY. Writing a post wasn’t something I got to do, it was something I had to do.

And that’s not for me anymore. The value of a blog isn’t the number of readers it has, but the quality of those readers, and the quality of the thought and discussion it creates. I think I can find another way to make money.

**This is in no way intended to knock blogs that make money. They perform a valuable service and deserve every penny they get. And yes, many have done an amazing job of maintaining integrity and becoming profitable.