Mar 19
The Death of Blogs and the Birth of New Big 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.
March 19th, 2008 at 4:52 pm
Very interesting thoughts, John. I’m especially interested with the idea that “blogging is anti-entrepreneurial”. I agree that blogging, perhaps more than any other kind of Internet ventures, is highly dependent on the personality of the founder. It’s more difficult to build a system around a blog that allows the founder to have freedom of time.
March 19th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
Yes, I think generally blogs are very hard to make into businesses that a founder can step away from. There are exceptions of course (like Gawker) but you’d need to have the money to hire talent up front, and the know how to turn them into great bloggers. Then comes the problems that are created if your writers choose to leave.
March 28th, 2008 at 6:37 am
John,
Insightful and right on!
I realized some of this in the middle of ‘07 and I struggled with it for months. I stepped back and tried a few different things to get my heart back into it. Ultimatley I’ve decided to scrap it as a business, now it is just a revenue stream and a platform for networking and building other business opportunities. But mostly, I try to remember why I originally started my blog. To have platform on which to write and express myself and meet other people. That is where I am going from now on… self expression and networking. If the money comes… fine. If it doesn’t, I’ve got plenty of other things going on.
March 28th, 2008 at 3:42 pm
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