The Economics Behind the Rise of the Blogs
A piece in Forbes chronicles the woes of the tech print media industry, who are getting flanked, drubbed, and ankle bitten by tech blogs even as the overall tech and Internet economy is flourishing.
Writer Brian Caulfield absolutely nails it with this one liner:
Bottom line: A successful blog can simply grab more readers, per employee, than more traditional media.
Now, “successful” doesn’t necessarily equate to quality, whether it’s print or online (or in blog form). But this gets to the heart of the basic math of publishing today: blogs are more nimble, more efficient, cheaper to run, and overall better equipped to cover the Internet and doings of the online world than print publications are. The latest potential casualty: Business 2.0 magazine.
Whereas blogs were once ridiculed for being amateurish, they’re now heralded (and in some cases scorned!) as triumphant crashers of the gates, the new barbarians that have ransacked the old media model.
Frantic Industries drills down one step deeper with another fabulous quote on the same subject:
A good blog is one guy/girl writing about one thing he/she knows better than anyone else out there.
The Forbes story illustrates this point with an anecdote about a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News who quit his professional journalism gig to found a now successful blog that pays his full-time salary, only to watch a batch of his former colleagues get laid off.
While it’s easy to think of blogs as mom-and-pop operations – and many highly profitable ones are indeed just that – they are increasingly thriving business operations in their own right. TechCrunch and Mashable and GigaOM are lean and mean online media companies that pump out dozens of stories round the clock. Blog networks are now a legitimate business enterprise as well, from Weblogs Inc. and Gawker to new comers such as b5media.
The business model is relatively simple: small teams hitting vertical spaces, and doing it faster and better than anyone else.
