Blogging as a business

There really is a wealth of information, both in the essay and in the comments, in liberalamerican's Blogdom as high school. I may actually need to come back to it a few times to focus on different points.

The essay links to a profile of Atrios/Duncan Black which appeared in the Philadelphia Enquirer.

Black makes a living at this. He takes ads and since January has grossed about $5,000 a month, he says. He has few costs.

Earlier this week, peeder, who used to work as a contractor for Daily Kos, implementing Ajax code for the web site, wrote an essay entitled "Blogging as a business". Here are some excerpts:

Mr. Moulitsas has simultaneously increased his payroll from one to six (so far), gone into book publishing, conventioneering, and large-scale software development (and in the latter case, with only himself as the predicted customer). He succeeded in all of those areas to a very limited extent during the perfect storm and doesn't understand quite how risky they all are and how thin the margins are to mutually cover the risk. He needs to be a big bank to sustain any of these fragile, hits-based enterprises, but only has a little lifestyle venture going.
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I wish I had better news about all this for him and his now several dependents. And of course he could pull it all (or enough of it) off. But if I were betting, I would say he's got about a 10% chance. Not of success. But of keeping that nice new house 24-36 months from now. The ante in any of these ventures is easily high enough to be ruinous. I've seen it all before.

And as he wakes up to realize his compounding risk level, he won't be able to bet enough on any of these risks to ensure any of them succeed enough to cover the others. He's a blogger, not a businessman.

Peeder's statement notwithstanding--even if Markos is "no businessman", Daily Kos is a business. He owns the brand, and his decisions are made in the interests of *his* bottom line. An excerpt from liberalamerican's diary...

The final piece of this may be the most interesting. Given that kos is a business, this latest move is what public relations people call repositioning. Daily Kos is repositioning itself as the central place for local blogs supporting political candidates. It is a brilliant business move with an election coming up. If the local bloggers buy into this, kos becomes in one stroke a major voice in the Democratic Party.

The $64 question is how much ideological control will kos exercise? His post gives a clue. He said, "Those are sites focused on the races that will determine whether we lose control of Congress, or whether we expand our numbers to Lieberman-proof majorities." In shorthand, kos had gone from Dean to Emanuel. Gone is the 50 state strategy. Gone are the progressive ideas. Instead he will publicize sites for candidates that can win.

Doesn't sound very "people powered" to me, except in that he's tried to use that as his branding. Kinda reminds me of the way Fox News tried to claim the words "fair and balanced" as a sort of trademark. I know all the arguments about how convenient it is to go to Daily Kos--how people don't go to the site for *him* but for the wide variety of offerings that can be found all under one roof. In a way, that keeps reminding me of WalMart. Even as I have become increasingly uncomfortable with the way Markos runs things over the past couple years, I hadn't stopped going there and was reluctant to stop posting there because of the convenience. And because of the chance, albeit small, of being "heard" by a larger audience.

One final point from liberalamerican's essay:

The more diaries you have, the chances are most of those diaries will be read only by a few people, friends, the few who stumble across them, and others. BUT every one of those diaries read reads gets counted as a read for the kos site. So let's assume kos has 500 diaries and each has ten readers--all of a sudden HIS SITE has 5,000 readers.

I'll be damned if I'm going to contribute to the success of his *business*, especially since it is becoming very clear that he does *not* share Howard Dean's belief in fighting in every state for every seat. So at minimun, "No link for you!" Markos. But I want to look at what can be done beyond that, because my own efforts will not be able to make a dent. All I do know is that, a lot of us stopped shopping at WalMart once we realized the cumulative effect of lots of individuals rationalizing that the convenience and prices were worth it. I hope more bloggers can start to consider the way their links to that site support a model of leadership that many of us find anathema--especially those of us who were inspired by Howard telling us "You have the power!"

By the way, I know this post is already kind of long, but while I'm on the topic, I highly recommend checking out this post at If I Ran the Zoo, addressing how "What's at stake here is the egalitarian and democratic nature of the blogosphere."

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