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Fri. May 06, 2005

Hey, Have You Heard of 'Blogs'?

There’s an article that “made the rounds” earlier in the week, and from what I can tell, a lot of people got all a-twitter over it. One might almost say, “pleasurably engorged.” But to me, the article sounds a bit like a rookie reporter showing up at Super Bowl XXVIII, and detailing the future of Super Bowls based on that one game, with no knowledge of the 27 that preceded it.

Based on that “exposure,” one might think the Super Bowl was all about breasts and costume malfunctions. Just as Michael Malone thinks blogs are all about making money.

A few months back I noted that the greatest challenge facing blogs and related Web sites is the lack of an effective revenue model. Even the most popular blogs are still light on advertising — and what advertising they do have is pretty low-grade stuff like political T-shirts, books and exercise programs. Most of this advertising isn’t even up to the grade of late-night cable, despite the fact that many blogs enjoy readerships larger than some major metropolitan newspapers.

Because of that, I also predicted at the time that the search for revenues would have two effects over the next couple years. First, the majority of the world’s millions of blogs would fade away, as their authors either abandon their entrepreneurial dreams of turning weblogging into a new career, get distracted by job and life changes, or just get tired of writing copy to a miniscule audience. Hundreds of thousands will remain — mostly people who blog for their own reasons, like modern day diarists — and hundreds of thousands of new bloggers will arrive, late to the scene … and interestingly, because they’ve learned from the failures of their predecessors, they will have a greater chance of success. But the bloom will be off the first blog revolution.

Ah, yes, “the first blog revolution.” I never can remember, did it begin on the left with Howard Dean’s campaign, or on the right with the takedown of Dan Rather? Because before then, there was a void. No real blogs existed prior to the current Empire of Political Blogging. And, of course, they grew out of warblogging, and before then, well, there was nothing. Blogs didn’t exist.

Even today’s blogs are barely visible … because they lack advertising.

Nevertheless, the search for real revenues, I suggested, would force many of these popular sites to begin to consolidate in hopes of finding economies of scale, interested mainstream advertisers and, ultimately, investors, employees and infrastructure.

It is interesting to note, then, that this prediction is already coming true. The talk of the blogosphere this week was the announcement, by blogger/mystery writer Roger L. Simon, Little Green Footballs, and others, of the creation of the Pajama Media, an aggregation of blogs from around the world designed specifically with the goal of attracting advertising. The response has apparently been extraordinary, with more than 200 blogs from everywhere on the planet already signed up.

200 blogs out of over eight million is an “extraordinary” response? I wish Pajamas Media the best of luck, but personally, the announcement didn’t move me one bit. I certainly wasn’t motivated to “join.” Why? It’s a collection of (so far) right wing views I’ve been reading for ages. Joy, another entry in the Red-Blue wars. Oh, I know, it’s going to be “different,” and there are claims it won’t all be right wing views (though there’s not a shred of evidence in the current roster). But regardless, we’re not inventing the wheel here, we’re aggregating for profit.

And profit is what blogs are all about.

Does all of this seem familiar? It certainly does to me — and I feel a bit of fool for not noticing it before. Ever since the dotcom bubble popped, we in the tech industry have been awaiting the next boom. Two years ago, when I first returned to writing this column, I confidently predicted that we would see just such a boom right about … now. So where is it?

And yet, even as we have been peering towards the horizon, scanning for the Next Big Thing, it may be peaking right under our feet, right now. The blogosphere is not just a media revolution, but the tech boom of our time.

So, let’s say the blogosphere is the tech boom we’ve been waiting for. If true, we can probably assume that most of the larger trends that affect all tech booms will obtain here.

One of these is the 80:20 rule. That is, 80 percent of all blogs out there will likely die in the next 18 months. Of the 20 percent that remain, the 80:20 rule will again apply, with just 20 percent actually becoming viable, profitable businesses, while the others limp along.

Because, of course, those eight million blogs appeared in a week or two, out of nowhere. It’s not like many of them have been around for five years (Ironic note: my first link was to “The Blogging Revolution” ... in July, 2000 … and I was a “Second Waver”). They just popped up very recently, and in 18 months, 80% of them will be gone.

Sure. And of the 20% that remain, only 20% of those will become “viable, profitable businesses, while the others limp along.” Well, I’ve been “limping along” a couple months shy of five years. During that time I’ve made approximately $250 from advertising. I must be a complete failure. Why do you even bother showing up here, I’ve got no ads for you to look at!

Far be it from me to suggest that if you’re working so hard you’ve turned your blog into a viable, profitable business … perhaps it’s not a blog anymore. Because I’ve got a blog that’s made less than $50 a year for five years running, long after Mr. Malone suggests I’ll get bored with it, give up on making money, or have life interfere. But I’ll be damned if I’m not still doing it (along with thousands of others doing it longer than me) ... because it’s fun.

If you blog for fun, or just for yourself, maybe that’s not a blog today. After all, people have been writing in diaries for centuries, and very few have found a way to profit from it. What’s up with that? Why do they keep doing it, when they will clearly never sell ads on it? What’s the point?

Or maybe if you blog about something other than politics, you’re not really blogging today. So I’m not sure what I’ve got here. But it isn’t what you people are talking about. Everybody seems to want to be a journalist, a columnist, a paid pundit, a talking head on the news channels spreading the Miracle of Blogs.

Doesn’t that sound like … work?

Did any of us start doing this because we felt like we needed to work more? Or did we start doing it because we loved having a place for personal expression? Then we added some ads, hoping to maybe make enough to cover our web hosting bills. Now we want to aggregate, go public, and make beau coup bucks.

But we haven’t lost our way. We still know what we must do first to have a “successful” site:

But the crucial first step is finding the money. New structures like the Pajama Media are interesting, but they are still missing something. Take it from a guy who used to run an 800,000 circulation magazine: the advertising agencies for Johnson & Johnson, Ford and Heineken are only marginally interested in raw numbers. What they want are “qualified” potential customers. It’s not enough to announce that you have 100,000 unique visitors each week to your blog; you have to characterize them. What do they buy, how old are they, where do they live, how much money do they make? Real advertisers want real results.

Getting that information will require asking blog readers to give up some of their anonymity. It will also take money — the kind of money that only comes with a business plan, spreadsheets, a hearty handshake with a venture capitalist, and betting everything you’ve got.

Are the leaders of the blogosphere ready to take that risk?

Get that? Blogs are interesting, but they’re lacking something. Ads. And you’re no longer a reader, you are a marketable piece of meat about whom we need more data.

Because without it, we can’t be successful. And it’s not that we want to be like the Mainstream Media. We just want to be successful on the same terms: audience size and profit. Because focusing on those priorities have worked so well for them, and made their profession what it is today.

Later: From Instapundit: “I’m at Henry Copeland’s panel on making money, and the discussion is very interesting. (Best line: ‘Bloggers are the garage bands of the Internet.’)”

Which is, in fact, an excellent analogy. For every ten thousand garage bands, one of them actually “makes it,” even well enough to support a meager living. The odds of financial success in the music business are overwhelming … yet people keep pluggin’ in and bangin’ on in their steamy garages.

Why? Because it’s not the very slim potential of a full time income that drives them. It’s a love for music. When your drive for financial success subsumes that passion, you become … Milli Vanilli.