Business Press Pays Attention To Blog Industry 139
prostoalex writes "Right after Business Week named WebLogs, Inc. one of the five Net companies to watch in 2005, the Associated Press has a feature on SixApart, the company behind Movable Type, Typepad and (after acquisition) LiveJournal. The article talks about the company starting to 'think big' after being approached by venture capitalists, and has some stats on the blog industry in general."
Dot.Com Bubble again (Score:5, Insightful)
So if I were to invest in on of these companies, where would my stock dividends be coming from?
Or is it another case of a dot.com investor not really understanding what they're buying into?
Am I the only non-blogger out there (Score:4, Insightful)
Blogging, IMHO, is overrated.
Hoo boy... (Score:5, Insightful)
Pardon the skepticism, but...
You know, it's crazy, but you'd think that after the dot.com bubble burst the venture capitalists would be a little more careful with their money when it came to tech, yet here they are, wanting to get in on an industry where the main product is something that is already available for free. Where will the revenue, and further, the return on the investment, come from? (Firing Berman out of a cannon?) What's worse is that if there's another burst like the last one, investors are going to go back to shying away from small tech companies that actually produce something.
I think this whole thing is a result of all the press that the mainstream media is giving blogs, and the only reason why I think they're getting all that press is because the media LOVES an opportunity to navel gaze.
Don't get me wrong, I think blogging is cool and all, and offers a chance for political/media/other watchdogs out there, and there are some blogs I find entertaining, but really, I can't help but think that all that money is just going to go right down the drain, and the only thing they'll have to show for it is a bunch of webpages of people and their cats.
VCs love a bubble ... (Score:2, Insightful)
I *strongly* suspect that venture capitalists (and brokers) made a killing during the dot com era regardless of the collapse.
It's the bigger fool idea - each person buys at stupidly inflated prices assuming there is an even bigger fool who will buy after them - but the VCs get in first so there was very often much bigger fools begging to be ripped off.
I seriously doubt that another bubble is going to be seen as anything but an opportunity by VCs.
Re:Dot.Com Bubble again (Score:4, Insightful)
Much has happen since... like, amazon, ebay, paypal. Wanna tell them that "online advertising is flawed"?.
Re:Am I the only non-blogger out there (Score:2, Insightful)
Would you not consider slashdot to be a blog? Sure the frontpage is controled by an select few and is considered to be a good source of news for geeks, but let's face it. This is a blog.
Oh. My. God. (Score:5, Insightful)
Blogging is _exactly_ what happened at the start of the internet craze - it's _home pages_. Blogs are just home pages that are easier to update than they used to be back in the olden days, so people don't have to worry about HTML in order to create them.
Blogs: Just easy-to-use web pages, nothing more, nothing less.
Re:Dot.Com Bubble again (Score:4, Insightful)
All those companies have real services and don't just survive off of advertisements. That said, if your blog pages are generating enough hits you can survive on just adds. What do you think keeps Google alive?
History repeats (Score:3, Insightful)
Historically speaking this has happened numerous times. Each time a new media appears it changes the way all previous media performs, killing that which is no longer viable, gradually reshaping "old media" and creating a new means of information. Think about how the printing press, television, and computers have all changed the way major media reacts with the masses. As the price of producing in that media lowers more people will begin to produce in that media, creating a more diverse body of knowledge than "popular opinion" that big media tends to stick with. For instance as the prices of printing came down during the industrial revolution many would-be activists printed pamphlets of their beliefs. I actually own a pamphlet printed from that time insisting that we should move to a 12 digit numeric system, not exactly something that would be put forth by main stream media at the time, especially with the push for metric. And so it is to be expected that blogging will recreate media, providing a check and balance system for main stream media, just as has happened in the past.
That said, part of the point is that the price must be low in order to be used. Bloggers that are read daily by large masses: Instapundit and Lileks for example can easily manage to pay for their bandwith costs and to use purchased blogger software, but the average blogger doesn't have a ton of readers and unless he gets discovered, more than likely eats hiis bandwith costs each month and will prefer the free model for blogging apps. So, as far as investments go, I am not sure that that particular model will prove productive.
Re:let blogs replace mass media (Score:3, Insightful)
No longer will it be easy to mislead the masses
The greatest fault, dear trufflemage, is not in our stars, but in ourselves....
Re:Dot.Com Bubble again (Score:4, Insightful)
"People aren't actually very willing to pay for somewhere to write their blog"
That's an extremely general statement; can you clarify? What people? Your friends? You're correct, in the tautalogical sense, that people who don't want to pay don't want to pay, but the important thing is that there are people who do.
The fact that your post was modded "insightful" shows that there are many who agree with you, but this may be similar to the "lots of people pirate music, thus people aren't willing to pay for it, thus the value of music is zero" fallacy. As the volume of piracy grows, so has Apple's business in paid downloads. And despite more and more free blogging services popping up, more people are paying. I'm able to measure this not in the abstract, let's-post-hunches-on-Slashdot sense, but by the amount of money that's put into my bank account each day.
To your credit, the "there's no business in blogging" sentiment is a popular one, but I'm just not seeing the evidence to support that.
Re:Hoo boy... (Score:2, Insightful)
I think investing in the moveable type company is a smart investment. You have millions of people willing to pay a monthly fee, and millions more likely to sign up in the coming months. That is a good revenue source.
And you are correct that blogger is free, but that could always change, and blogger has limits. I personally use blogger right now, but I often think of changing to moveable type because it is simply a better product with more features (but I am cheap, so I don't
Moveable type is the best blogging software on the market, and again, it is a big market, so it sounds like a pretty smart investment to me.
And as for the all you will have is blogs about cats, sure there are many blogs that are like that. But there are also that are very professionally run that provide good information. Slashdot is essentially a blog for example. Instapundit, Vodkapundit, and probably a thousand more I don't know about are all run very professionally. I suspect they are both turning a profit.
I would compare blogs to magazines. There are a million crappy or very niche magazines out there. I am sure hundreds of them fail every year, and hundreds more are started every year. But no one thinks all magazines are going to go away anytime soon. If you turn out a quality product that attracts a broad following, be it a magazine, a newspaper, or a blog, you will be successful. If you have a poor quality product about a topic no one cares about, then you won't.
Re:Am I the only non-blogger out there (Score:3, Insightful)
No-one's asking you to believe that. However, "the blogosphere" becoming the source of an increasing number of stories, increasingly able to set the agenda (to an extent you may not even realize if you're not reading blogs; the evening news has been worthless for a while but for me it's now redundant for a lot of stories), and taking down various importent entities should be enough to believe that the blogosphere is having an impact.
"Revolution" may be a bit strong at the moment, but the evidence that it can get there is pretty strong.
At this point, trying to pretend that the blogosphere is having no impact is just willful ignorance, whether because you're too elitist to believe "the masses" can have anything to say (actually, it's all individuals, you know...) or because you think the word "blog" is stupid or whatever reason you have. It doesn't change what's happening.
Re:Reality Check (Score:3, Insightful)
That's not actually how it's turning out, though. See, out of the 7 million blogs out there, there might be only 10 that are even remotely interesting to you. Somebody else has his own 10. And somebody else has his 10. The net result is that every blog has an audience.
Ed Driscoll had an article on Tech Central Station about this a few weeks back. He talked about the fact that the vast majority of blogs operate in a high-trust environment. A blog is read by the author's friends and family, his co-workers, people in his town, people who share his interests. A blogger who's really good will pick up some audience on merit, but generally his audience is gonna be limited to people who know him, either personally or professionally, directly or indirectly. A big blog might only have an audience of a few thousand people a day, but every one of those few thousand people trusts the blog's author.
See, you're thinking of a blog that's only of interest to a few hundred people as a waste of space. That's the wrong way to look at it. Instead, you need to look at it as a six-degrees-of-separation type thing. Consider the Eason Jordan story from last month. I know about that because I read about it on a blog written by a woman I work with; she heard the story from another blogger she collaborates with; she heard it from a Congressman, who was there.
Compare and contrast to the old model of news distribution where a reporter writes a story which may or may not be true, and that story gets distributed by a wire service that you may or may not trust, to end up in a newspaper you may or may not read.
Think about the tsunami videos. Within hours after the Indonesian quake, home videos were available on the Internet, passed from hand to hand from the people who shot them to bloggers who shared them with friends. Within a day, the whole world had seen them. It was a classic "tell two people" expansion.
Blogs with small audiences are not failures. They're part of the web. See?
Re:Not a good thing (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't see blog corruption in your example, I see a Major News Organization who either didn't research the story enough to verify it, or convey the fact that they did that research well enough to convince you.
All stories start out as uncorraborated rumors, unless the media has people and cameras directly on the site of the story. But ultimately, whether or not a story starts out as video footage or something I mumbled in my sleep last night is utterly irrelevant... the question is, is it true?
By the way, if you honestly think you've been getting "no media bullshit", you're nuts, absolutely nuts, and grossly misinformed. I had no idea that there were still so many people who still thought the media was some sort of mystically holy and unbiased source of news until I read the comments for this article. I mean, isn't the history of the term "yellow journalism" part of the standard history course in school still? An entire war largely manufactured by journalists? This isn't news, people...
Re:Oh. My. God. (Score:2, Insightful)
Excellent point. Just what I've been mumbling to myself for a while; I'm glad someone came out and said it.
To amplify: Personal web pages, a.k.a. "Blogs", are revolutionary. They are changing the world, and I imagine they will continue to do so. They started doing so around 1990. The techies got involved in big numbers around 1993. The man on the street started noticing around 1997. A while later someone came up with some nice interface ideas and coined the word "Blog". Good for them, but that was just another step in a revolution that had begun a decade earlier.
Now some pundits wake up and say, "Hey! The internet isn't only about huge companies!" Well, it never was, and I'm glad they finally figured that out.