Earning Money From BoingBoing, TechCrunch And Huffington Post
PORTFOLIO asks: “Why on earth should it be more difficult to estimate potential revenues for a blog than it is for other forms of media? In the short term, most big blogs, like TechCrunch or BoingBoing or Huffington Post, know pretty much exactly what their revenues are going to be. And in the long term, no one knows anything in any medium.”
Says Gawker:
Gawker Media
Our publisher Nick Denton loves to point out that no major media company could buy Gawker and keep up the site’s outsider angle. Of course he wants you to believe Gawker does something special and to think of it as a competitor to decades-old media empires. But he’s not lying.When this network tried licensing stories to Yahoo News two years ago, the editors bitched about it (this was before he replaced them with inexperienced, unsure toadies like me), and the stories never did well. Gawker and Yahoo let the contract expire, and while Denton pretended it was because I kept maligning Yahoo execs on our Silicon Valley site Valleywag, it was really because no one was reading Gawker on Yahoo. Their audience just wasn’t interested.
Imagine you were running this show. Why sell it and either work under some executive who probably hates you for some five-year-old blog post, or struggle to start another business that becomes this influential? It’s easy to say Denton is in this for the money, but only if you’ve never seen the man revel in his own role. He doesn’t want to be rich, he wants to be Rupert Murdoch.
Anorak was on Yahoo! news for years. It never worked well. As for Denton – can you be a poor – non-rich – Rupert Murdoch?
Boing Boing
Boing Boing is owned by its four idiosyncratic writers, who act like the blog is still the small-time zine it started out as in the 90s. For example, Cory Doctorow always pushes his anti-copyright agenda, and Mark Frauenfelder owns the ukulele news beat. That’s why the blog remains popular even when sites like Digg theoretically replaced the its role as a clearinghouse for Internet memes. The blog was getting nearly a million views per day before the team stopped publicly reporting traffic, but at its heart it’s a personal blog, and selling it would be like selling a favorite pet: theoretically possible but against the whole point. Besides, they all have other work that they can promote to their Boing Boing fans, and that’s more valuable than ad revenue.
Big blogs owe their popularity to reader habit. The bigger ones started earlier than most. And that’s it…
Posted: 6th, March 2008 | In: Money Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
