Blog!: The Business

oh mann. ich sollte wirklich lieber schlafen gehen, aber diese artikel sind einfach zu gut. und dieser hier ist sogar schon ein jahr alt, ein wunder, daß ich ihn nicht schon früher entdeckt habe... ein kleiner überblick über den versuch mit blogs geld zu verdienen, vorgestellt werden zwei protagonisten: nick denton und jason calacanis, die über kleine blog-imperien gebieten. sind auch ziemlich erfolgreich damit, einige der populärsten blogs gehören denen. jason calacanis hat neulich weblogs.inc für 25mio $ an aol verkauft.

It wasn't a casual idea for him. Denton had been speaking with evangelistic fervor about the movement for months. He had his own blog and even tried to buy Pyra Labs, creator of Blogger software, from founders Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan. Denton's next step was offering Peter Rojas - "an underemployed freelancer," says Denton - money to do the gadget venture.

[...]

And here's the thing: If Spiers (or any of the Gawker Media bloggers) had done this on her own, the response would have been minimal. Denton's move to professionalize blogs bestowed instant credibility on an unknown single-writer Web site. When Gawker launched, it was still unusual for a regular media site to reference the personal blog of some savant wordsmith, but it was well within bounds to discuss the well-hired hand of a new media publisher - and even write stories about her. Denton hadn't merely created a blog, he'd created a brand. In almost no time, Gawker not only won an audience but was chosen as one of Time's 50 Best Web sites and made Entertainment Weekly's IT list.

[...]

Denton's next move: a porn-blog called Fleshbot. His goal was not to capture the highfalutin erotica of sites like Nerve, but an intelligent presentation of dirty stuff. "No normal guy jacks off to poetry," he wrote in a memo explaining the site. Employing his diamond-in-the-blogosphere strategy, Denton found John d'Addario, a New Orleans-based art dealer.

[...]

Denton: Like I really want to know: who throws the best dinner parties in DC; why they're so desperately unglamorous; whether young Reps and Dems find it hot to date across party lines; whether Carville and Matalin really live their lives out in public; how their hair gets that way; what politicians say when they're asking for money; how badly the Pentagon bureaucracy hates Rumsfeld I want to understand how DC works, not the mechanics of cloture, but the social and political power lines. Like: if I was to come to DC, whom would I have to schmooze, how could I conquer the town what are the things about DC that the newspapers never tell you?

Cox: that is a really tall order for someone getting paid $1500/mo

Still, Cox wasn't about to fight. "This is pretty much the only thing I can do," she says. She was initially averse to the gender-specific title of Wonkette, but Denton soothed her by typing: "So long as you're lethal in the content, cutesiness of the name won't matter."

[...]

Jason Calacanis will cheerfully admit that the blood feud between him and Nick Denton is at least partly hype. Denton, too, characterizes it as an overplayed soap opera. They both confirm that every few months the two have dinner, and the conversation is considerably more polite than a typical Choire Sicha item on Gawker. But the fact is that both men are bumping shoulders in the same space: hiring writers for their niche-directed, ad-supported blogs. "The difference is that he wants to own everything and I want to share it with the writer," says Calacanis.

[...]

Calacanis also went after Peter Rojas, the Gizmodo writer who was Denton's first blogger. Again, he offered something Denton wouldn't consider yielding - a piece of the action. Rojas accepted, taking half ownership in a new blog called Engadget, and the feud was on. Denton claimed in his own blog that he was "royally shafted." But now he shrugs it off, figuring that losing his writers is "the law of media careers. Do I expect writers to stay with the blogs for the rest of their lives? No." He relies on his belief that the blogosphere is an unending source of undiscovered talent. And posits that when writers defect, the ensuing buzz is actually a blessing in disguise: "The change in Gizmodo has actually been fantastic for traffic," he says.

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All of which begs a big question: How much money really is in this blogging business? Those who have looked at the model conclude that there's no pot of gold here. In other words, they don't call it nanopublishing for nothing. "These are not large-scale journalistic efforts," says Martin Nisenholtz, CEO of New York Times Digital. "I agree with Nick's characterization of them as like independent films - really small independent films." Do the math: Denton pays a writer something like $2,000 a month and maybe a thousand more in overhead. Gawker Media, with a one-person sales staff, has lured advertisers like Absolut Vodka, British Airways, Jose Cuervo, and the John Kerry campaign. (Microsoft had been poised to advertise on Gizmodo, but then came that bicycle seat-dildo. No sense of humor.) Denton won't say how much he takes in, but he points to press accounts estimating that ad-based blogs might gross about $5,000 a month. Calacanis agrees that's in the ballpark. And if all the ads for Gawker are sold for the prices on its rate card, the total could be well over $10,000 a month. At the high end, that's $80K or so net per blog per year - nice pocket change but not yet the stuff of moguls. Even if, as some analysts say, that amount triples or quadruples in a few years, we're not talking about a bunk bed at Herb Allen's summer camp. That's why, Denton says, he's not hiring full-time employees. Maybe it's not a real business.