The irony of blogging about bloggers discussing blogging does not escape me....
These two gentlemen discuss the economics of blogging and in a sense they are both right. Jason Calacanis(an acquaintance who unfortunately could not be a speaker this semester) runs (and sold to AOL) an aggregator of top blogs, and Alan Meckler, a longtime entrepreneur. Jason thinks blogs can make money; Meckler thinks 99.9% can't.
I believe they are both right. Generating good content, matching it with advertisers using the automated ad systems of Google et al (essentially outsourcing it), and making a reasonable journalism living is definitely possible - the economics work well enough as Jason points out, for a blog of a certain size.
Getting to that size is the difficulty, and even more so now that entrepreneurs like Jason have blocked out some of the obvious verticals (obvious in that there is an interested audience, ability to create valuable content, and a high values to advertisers) and become embedded in the blogosphere through branding, cross-linking, and indexing by search engines.
However, if one simply thinks of blogs as easy publishing tools for websites that allow the content producer to DIY it, then the only real difference blogs have made to the web is lower the capital cost of website creation and maintenance (barrier to entry) - the same problems of revenue generation and marketing the content developed apply.
Alan Meckler writes: Blogs are really diaries or microcosms of what is happening in millions of ways in daily life -- ranging from special interests to business specialties to whatever. Obviously there is money to be made with blogs, but very, very few will bring in more than a few hundred dollars per year.
Jason created a great business model in aggregating blogs. But here again the opportunities to replicate this model will be few and far between -- the reason being that such a model requires at least one or two anchor blogs that will be attractive to advertisers. Much like great magazine empires that offer magazine networks only a few of the magazines are big winners -- these big winners help support the weaker magazines -- same with blogs
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