Can Blogging Ever Become Big Business?
Business 2.0 : "By Greg Lindsay, April 28, 2005
Snips: "At the moment, blogging is a small business enterprise, not a speculative venture. While the VCs seemed poised to swoop down a year ago, so far only the toolmakers like Six Apart (maker of Movable Type) and blog searcher Technorati have attracted any funding. "
John Battelle's "plan is to offer himself as a publisher-as-service to blogging entities. He'd aggregate traffic, sell category-specific advertising against the sites in the FM network, and handle the back-end business and tech issues. He's done much of this for BoingBoing, where he's been acting as "band manager," as he puts it, for more than a year to generate cash from the site.
Calacanis, who is definitely a rising-tide-lifts-all-boats type, offered, via e-mail, this rosy summary of Battelle's accomplishments there: "John did an amazing job over the past six months taking BoingBoing from ad/revenue-free to ad/revenue-filled without upsetting the user base or the four bloggers. I understand it makes $40k a month and is growing ... so $500,000 a year across five folks is a nice living ... if John can do that 10 more times he has a very powerful business." (Battelle says, "We don't talk about numbers, but they are in the right range, if a bit high.") BoingBoing has already signed up as FM Publishing's first client, provided Battelle can get his company off the ground."
Lindsay sums up: "Battelle's philosophy and his business plan signal that 1) blogs are valuable enough to be worth owning, and 2) he's inviting the mainstream media to decide what "enough" means in the case of ventures as small as his own...Personally, I can't wait to see what that dollar figure might be, but that could just be my wishful thinking again."
posted by Jen @ 3:57 am
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