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Letter from a friend: “My shoeshine boy told me about his BLOG today”
One of my college roommates wrote me last week.
Just when it seems like everyone needs to have a BLOG seems like a perfect time to SELL OUT.Blogging is starting to read (sound) like a terrifically boring game of telephone - everyone linking everyone else’s non-facts in a way that resembles an accumulation of facts - minus the facts.
Instapundit, god’s gift to blogging, has become a conduit for Ann Coulter’s pieces that failed fact checking. Arianna Huffington publicized a BLOG. Dude, the writing is ALL OVER THE INTERNET.
Like all forms of apocalypse, your revenues are probably rising faster than ever before. The horizon looks endless when you’re on a cliff. Hell, last year’s catch of giant tuna was bigger than the previous catch of giant tuna. Geez, why worry about oil reserves when we’re able to pump more oil than ever before?
All harvests peak like Mount Everest and end in Death Valley. It’s the nature of non-renewable resources. Readable Blogging is a non-renewable resource in the short and medium term, not to even cringe over the long term. Most people really don’t need their opinion aired - at any expense. In any event, regardless of what the purists believe, big media will eventually control traffic to BLOGs (and Google will be there to sell ads).
CB radios are awfully cheap these days…
I replied:
I’ve got two problems — a) selling Blogads Inc would take six months, distract the hell out of me and have only a 50% likelyhood of success… and by the time I did it, I’d get $1 million after taxes for six years of blood sweat & tears and be obligated to move to Palo Alto and buy a house for $1.2 million and sweat for two years and watch someone fuck what we’ve built. b) no matter what everyone else is doing, our kick-ass little network IS going to get bigger. Traditional publishing is screwed in 25 different ways. See this graph and consider that when you factor in hours per media, the arbitrage is even 10X greater. We’re part of the solution/successor model. Sure, we may end up just being America’s premiere political magazine (if Omidyar or Gates gnaw off pieces of the new niches we’re trying to empower), but even that miniature ambition will be an exciting business. (Two publications focused on DC — the Hill and Roll Call –take in $150 million ad revenues a year.) Last thought: online advertising will grow 25% a year for the next decade, and our niche will match or outperform that. There are LOTS of ways we can mess up, so many that that I’ve lost enough sleep that I’m now too tired to lose sleep over them any more. But bursting the blog bubble would be great, blowing any riffraff competition out of the space. Why sell out when, if we manage well and have some luck, we can work with some of America’s most interesting writers and advertisers for the next couple of decades?
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