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Business Press Pays Attention To Blog Industry
prostoalex writes "Right after Business Week named WebLogs, Inc. one of the five Net companies to watch in 2005, the Associated Press has a feature on SixApart, the company behind Movable Type, Typepad and (after acquisition) LiveJournal. The article talks about the company starting to 'think big' after being approached by venture capitalists, and has some stats on the blog industry in general."
These blogging sites are great for getting stats with big numbers that will impress the money men, like page impressions, and users, and gigs of bandwidth.. but what about the revenue? People aren't actually very willing to pay for somewhere to write their blog, you can't run a multi-million dollar business on the back of T-Shirt merchandising sales, and online advertising is a business model shown to be flawed in the late 90s..
So if I were to invest in on of these companies, where would my stock dividends be coming from?
Or is it another case of a dot.com investor not really understanding what they're buying into?
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Blogging, IMHO, is overrated.
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The article talks about the company starting to 'think big' after being approached by venture capitalists, and has some stats on the blog industry in general.
Pardon the skepticism, but...
You know, it's crazy, but you'd think that after the dot.com bubble burst the venture capitalists would be a little more careful with their money when it came to tech, yet here they are, wanting to get in on an industry where the main product is something that is already available for free. Where will the revenue, and further, the return on the investment, come from? (Firing Berman out of a cannon?) What's worse is that if there's another burst like the last one, investors are going to go back to shying away from small tech companies that actually produce something.
I think this whole thing is a result of all the press that the mainstream media is giving blogs, and the only reason why I think they're getting all that press is because the media LOVES an opportunity to navel gaze.
Don't get me wrong, I think blogging is cool and all, and offers a chance for political/media/other watchdogs out there, and there are some blogs I find entertaining, but really, I can't help but think that all that money is just going to go right down the drain, and the only thing they'll have to show for it is a bunch of webpages of people and their cats.
"you'd think that after the dot.com bubble burst the venture capitalists would be a little more careful with their money when it came to tech"
I *strongly* suspect that venture capitalists (and brokers) made a killing during the dot com era regardless of the collapse.
It's the bigger fool idea - each person buys at stupidly inflated prices assuming there is an even bigger fool who will buy after them - but the VCs get in first so there was very often much bigger fools begging to be ripped off.
I seriously doubt that another bubble is going to be seen as anything but an opportunity by VCs.
The whole fuss over people on both sides of the debate "Blogging will change the universe!" and "Blogging is just pointless!" misses the point.
Blogging is _exactly_ what happened at the start of the internet craze - it's _home pages_. Blogs are just home pages that are easier to update than they used to be back in the olden days, so people don't have to worry about HTML in order to create them.
Blogs: Just easy-to-use web pages, nothing more, nothing less.
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First, in reference to those who don't get blogging: It is finally a way for all of us would-be writers and journalists to express our humble opinions in a place where they might actually be read. It is a diverse community without the usualy limits and editing done when something is written within major media.
Historically speaking this has happened numerous times. Each time a new media appears it changes the way all previous media performs, killing that which is no longer viable, gradually reshaping "old media" and creating a new means of information. Think about how the printing press, television, and computers have all changed the way major media reacts with the masses. As the price of producing in that media lowers more people will begin to produce in that media, creating a more diverse body of knowledge than "popular opinion" that big media tends to stick with. For instance as the prices of printing came down during the industrial revolution many would-be activists printed pamphlets of their beliefs. I actually own a pamphlet printed from that time insisting that we should move to a 12 digit numeric system, not exactly something that would be put forth by main stream media at the time, especially with the push for metric. And so it is to be expected that blogging will recreate media, providing a check and balance system for main stream media, just as has happened in the past.
That said, part of the point is that the price must be low in order to be used. Bloggers that are read daily by large masses: Instapundit and Lileks for example can easily manage to pay for their bandwith costs and to use purchased blogger software, but the average blogger doesn't have a ton of readers and unless he gets discovered, more than likely eats hiis bandwith costs each month and will prefer the free model for blogging apps. So, as far as investments go, I am not sure that that particular model will prove productive.
Unfortunately, there's a major downside to having a plethora of news outlets: each ends up catering to a narrow target audience, and people tend to gravitate towards those outlets which slant the news in keeping with their own personal biases. Why bother confronting uncomfortable issues when you can switch to a blog that spins them your way or ignores them altogether?
No longer will it be easy to mislead the masses
The greatest fault, dear trufflemage, is not in our stars, but in ourselves....
All I came up with is, for every 4,000,000 blogs published, 1 is made by someone with something important and meaningful to say.
That's not actually how it's turning out, though. See, out of the 7 million blogs out there, there might be only 10 that are even remotely interesting to you. Somebody else has his own 10. And somebody else has his 10. The net result is that every blog has an audience.
Ed Driscoll had an article on Tech Central Station about this a few weeks back. He talked about the fact that the vast majority of blogs operate in a high-trust environment. A blog is read by the author's friends and family, his co-workers, people in his town, people who share his interests. A blogger who's really good will pick up some audience on merit, but generally his audience is gonna be limited to people who know him, either personally or professionally, directly or indirectly. A big blog might only have an audience of a few thousand people a day, but every one of those few thousand people trusts the blog's author.
See, you're thinking of a blog that's only of interest to a few hundred people as a waste of space. That's the wrong way to look at it. Instead, you need to look at it as a six-degrees-of-separation type thing. Consider the Eason Jordan story from last month. I know about that because I read about it on a blog written by a woman I work with; she heard the story from another blogger she collaborates with; she heard it from a Congressman, who was there.
Compare and contrast to the old model of news distribution where a reporter writes a story which may or may not be true, and that story gets distributed by a wire service that you may or may not trust, to end up in a newspaper you may or may not read.
Think about the tsunami videos. Within hours after the Indonesian quake, home videos were available on the Internet, passed from hand to hand from the people who shot them to bloggers who shared them with friends. Within a day, the whole world had seen them. It was a classic "tell two people" expansion.
Blogs with small audiences are not failures. They're part of the web. See?
So I'm watching this ABC broadcast I believe it was and they had some story about an Iraqi girl some army unit saving a little girl.. and the source quoted was "A blog". Now this is where I get problems, as soon as blogs become "well known media" we start to see them corrupting.
I don't see blog corruption in your example, I see a Major News Organization who either didn't research the story enough to verify it, or convey the fact that they did that research well enough to convince you.
All stories start out as uncorraborated rumors, unless the media has people and cameras directly on the site of the story. But ultimately, whether or not a story starts out as video footage or something I mumbled in my sleep last night is utterly irrelevant... the question is, is it true?
By the way, if you honestly think you've been getting "no media bullshit", you're nuts, absolutely nuts, and grossly misinformed. I had no idea that there were still so many people who still thought the media was some sort of mystically holy and unbiased source of news until I read the comments for this article. I mean, isn't the history of the term "yellow journalism" part of the standard history course in school still? An entire war largely manufactured by journalists? This isn't news, people...
Excellent point. Just what I've been mumbling to myself for a while; I'm glad someone came out and said it.
To amplify: Personal web pages, a.k.a. "Blogs", are revolutionary. They are changing the world, and I imagine they will continue to do so. They started doing so around 1990. The techies got involved in big numbers around 1993. The man on the street started noticing around 1997. A while later someone came up with some nice interface ideas and coined the word "Blog". Good for them, but that was just another step in a revolution that had begun a decade earlier.
Now some pundits wake up and say, "Hey! The internet isn't only about huge companies!" Well, it never was, and I'm glad they finally figured that out.