spent time with jason calcanis at gnomedex last week downloading the whole story on his weblogs business. jason has created a compelling model with 75 professional blogs served by 106 part time bloggers and over $1 mllion in revs. seems that with 65% of advertisers looking to get in on the blog world and such a small number of points of critical mass that jason is well positioned. and while he's done this on a shoestring (as he's a scrappy and super cheap brooklyn kid), it made me wonder what a larger company might do with the same model. seems like the major newspaper players are all thinking this direction with nytimes buying about.com and others announcing plans to launch blogging. seems that we're headed into a world where the majority of news content will be 'self-published' and the news orgs will act more as editors. in that world breadth of coverage at a low cost may beat out depth of creation at a high cost.
[aside...i had dinner last night with a good friend and old newspaper guy (who said he never reads my blog:( he agreed that newspapers could be far more profitable without the newsrooms but worried what that meant for our democracy. it seems to me that it's only getting better when so many more voices can be heard and we have such a huge number of people vetting every story.]
anyway, i wonder how long it will be before jason's tight little operation gets scooped up by a big media company with bigger plans and what that will mean for the blog world...and democracy:)
I'm sure a bigger media company will buy JC business,just wait the sixapart /yahoo deal.The only problem is that everybody in Silicon Valley want to be in the fortune 500 list.
An alternative ? read this : http://www.37signals.com/svn/archives2/2005/03/sxsw_2005_prese.php
Posted by: jamin | July 25, 2005 at 12:54 AM