For some reason, and perhaps it’s because Dave Sifry came out with his most recent stats on the growth of the blogosphere, there’s a flurry of recent interest by the mainstream press in blogging. And the common theme among these articles is: what are blogs worth from a traditional publishing standpoint?
The Wall Street Journal today has this amusing debate between publishing greybeard Alan Meckler and new media firebrand Jason Calcanis on the question of whether bloggers can make money. Meckler says no, Calcanis says yes but they both agree that it depends on how much traffic a blog attracts.
My favorite curmudgeon Scott Karp says that blogging is simply publishing and basic media economics 101. He says that if you generate the numbers, you will make money. “The better the blog, the bigger the audience, the better the business,” Karp writes.
But, unlike traditional publishing, blogging is a prestige thing, a way to get your name out on the Internet and establish your bona fides, as this Boston Globe piece pointed out a few days ago. This is a new aspect to publishing that didn’t really exist until the ascendancy of blogging. Sure, prior to the rise of the web some folks entered publishing in the hopes of greater glory, but the costs of printing and distribution pretty much weeded out vanity publishers.
Finally, the Guardian had this piece yesterday about the disproportionate impact of blogs on elite opinion makers.
“That’s exactly right,” said Glenn Reynolds, author of An Army of Davids, which explores the explosion in web punditry. “Bloggers and blog-readers are ‘influentials’ - the minority that pays attention to events outside of political and news cycles. They also tend on average to be better off, better educated and, more importantly, employed.”
From this vantage point, blogs are much more akin to old-fashioned, high-priced dead-tree newsletters. Newsletter publishers (how quaintly archaic that terms seems) used to target niche markets, put out a steady stream of insiderish content ignored by the consumer and trade press and charge through the nose for it. Now, however, blogs are starting to fill that niche.
Update: Did the Wall Street Journal take a page out of Steve Rubel’s book? Steve ran two interviews a while ago with both Alan Meckler and Jason Calcanis on the subject of…whether blogs can make money? Here’s Meckler’s interview and here’s Calacanis’ interview.
Cynthia Brumfield at 7:07 AM|Comments(1)
Cynthia, interesting observation about the newsletters -- unfortunately, that paid content business model won't work anymore. If a prominent blogger put their content behind a paid subscriber wall, they'd kill their network and 50 other bloggers would show up to take their place for free. You can't corner the niche market anymore the way old newsletter publishers did -- there's too much competition.
Posted by: Curmudgeon 2.0 at April 19, 2006 5:27 PM
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