Wired: Toward a Weblogging Empire
MarketWatch: Blogging Business Idea Gets Booed
NickDenton.org: Blog Empires
BuzzMachine: Blogbiz: Bubble Boy or Baron?
PaidContent: Weblogs Inc: The About.com of Trade Blogs? and [no title]
The big buzz this week in the blogosphere is the announcement of Weblogs, Inc. , Jason McCabe Calacanis's brash play to create a business-to-business weblogging media empire. Calacanis, a long-time player in the NY Internet scene, is best known as the founder and CEO of the late Silicon Alley Reporter (SAR). So far, most of the reaction from around the web has been cynical at best.
In a nutshell, Calacanis and company's strategy is to attract a large number of top-notch bloggers and journalists (Wired cites 300 by the end of the year, based on an interview with Calacanis) on various business niche topics, and the site would then split revenues, principally from ads.
Nick Denton, fellow commercial blog publisher (of Gawker, Gizmodo and other pending properties), lists five major problems with Weblogs, Inc.'s model, including that A-list bloggers aren't going to want to subordinate their brands under Weblogs, Inc.'s; that it will be hard to manage writers' expectations as to what kind of revenues they might expect; and that it is foolhardy to reinvent the wheel of a blog publishing tool, with dozens already on the market, including a few that are very good, notably Movable Type (which MarketingWonk uses).
On the other hand, PaidContent's Rafat Ali, formerly an editor at SAR, thinks that Weblog, Inc.'s CEO Brian Alvey (former CTO at SAR and also the guy behind, among other things, Blogstakes.com) brings a lot of credibility to Weblogs, Inc.'s new publishing engine. He quotes Alvey describing it as "MovableType-(or TypePad)-meets-Salesforce.com, plus some amazing editorial research tools and the functionality of a few other sites."
Jeff Jarvis, a media critic and CEO of one of the largest chains of newspaper sites, Advance.net , raises some other skepticisms about the new venture. These include casting aspersions on the site's bombastic claim that "traditional journalism is, in a word, broken" (* yawn *). Jarvis also ridicules the site's claim that "after the [dot-com] bust, everyone realized that…they can make a better living on their own as a freelancer."
The fact that Calacanis has never blogged does little to enhance his credibility in the blogosphere.
At the same time, I find Nick's skepticism about blogs' potential to make money (quoted in the Wired piece) a bit insincere. First of all, if he really believed so, why would he be pouring many thousands of dollars into building up his own blog publishing empire? He's got a lot more under development than the two super-popular blogs he's already launched.
Moreover, Nick's citing the fact that Gawker and Gizmodo presently make only $2,000 a month each in ad revenue is a total red herring. The truth is, I know that Nick (a friend of mine) has so far not tried to sell ads seriously, the present revenue coming only from passive Google AdSense ads and affiliate deals. More than a few major advertisers, including at least one big liquor brand, have approached him about advertising, and he simply hasn't followed up on them. Now he has contracted an exclusive ad rep for the sites — a name well-known in the inner circles of the online ad world — and I expect we will soon see the potential that some popular blogs can command on the ad front, which will likely surprise many skeptics.
The final irony in all this is a sentence from Marketwatch's story: "Calacanis's challenge is to find solid, fact-checking, deadline-driven, responsible journalists whose reporting will be trusted and perhaps, even bought, by business." No doubt. That's the bane of self publishing, beautifully evidenced by the fact that, as of this writing, Calacanis's own name is misspelled in the footer of Weblogs, Inc. (pictured here for posterity). When I had my first full-time job as a journalist 18 years ago, my editor imparted this axiom of the news biz on one of my first days: "If you can't trust a journalist to spell a name right, what of his reporting can you trust?"
UPDATE/CORRECTION:
Brian Alvey writes to humbly take responsibility for the typo (which makes me feel bad for being so snotty, as he seems like a nice guy in my earlier dealings). He also corrects me on the fact that designer Jeffrey Zeldman has nothing to do with Weblogs, Inc., as I had suggested in an earlier draft, and he writes:
Plus, you mention your site uses "Moveable Type".
It's really spelled "Movable Type."
You should probably correct that on your site before someone takes a screen shot of it…
Touché.
