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February 24, 2006Tradition, tradition! Tradition!
Tradition, tradition! Tradition!Who, day and night, must scramble for a living,
Feed a wife and children, say his daily prayers?
And who has the right, as master of the house,
To have the final word at home?Newspapers, Newspapers! Tradition.
Newspapers, Newspapers! Tradition.Who must know the way to question all assumptions,
Ignore the bills and children, Google every day?
And who has the right, as humans on this earth,
To not believe the status quo?The Bloggers, The Bloggers! It'sTreason!
The Bloggers, The Bloggers! It'sTreason!Okay… so the war between The Empire and The Rebels has begun. But don't bother picking a side. It's only a movie.
As someone who has been in this internet game as long as almost anyone, about nine years now, almost as long as AOL has offered access to the World Wide Web, I have some perspective. I also have a vested interest. When I started writing for the web, under the steady hand of Time-Warner, I left my position with print media (also for Time-Warner) and never looked back. The power of a medium that talks back to you was home to me almost instantly. And so, outside of a brief period in which my internet life was abruptly flipped into the air by, of all things, an internet company buying Time-Warner, I have never looked for freelance or permanent work in the print or television media. I have decided, more than a couple of times by now, to commit to and to do my best to make a happy home on the web.
In those early days at TNT roughcut.com, the question always was, "How are you funded and why?" And the answer was always, "We don't really know." I think the primary reason was the vision of a young executive named Scot Safon, whose marketing department at TNT paid for the existence of roughcut, never able to make much money on it - we sold no ads, except as added value to some TNT advertisers - but somehow understanding that there was interesting work to be done that he would not only support, but for whose existence he would fight and fight hard. (Scot is now at CNN, making sure that Anderson Cooper always looks like the GQ Dan Rather.)
As part of a big company, we had an unusually high budget for a fledgling web business, a bit under a million dollars a year. But it was apparent then, even if we were selling ads, making that kind of money in ads was nearly impossible.
At some point in my run there, Inside.com popped up and taught us some new lessons about how not to make any money as an internet content provider. The biggest lesson was that a $10 million a year budget for a website was every bit as impossible to support as a $1 million budget.
At that point, Inside.com was given all kinds of credence by the then-mainstream media (more on that naming issue to come) because they were fully funded and they were hiring away a lot of talent from newspapers and magazines. Unfortunately, no one at the paper seemed to understand the principles of running daily. They hired Andrew Hindes from Variety, but he didn't get to make the big calls on staffing. And what was apparent from Day One was that not everyone was meant to be on a daily web site, no matter how good a writer they were, and competing with the trades was very doable… but not, at that time, for a website only business.
But Inside.com and Salon and Slate and indeed, roughcut.com, were after something that seemed to be a reasonable goal back then… a really big daily audience. The advertising standard for the web was roughly the advertising standard for print media and television… a pure eyeball play. But as we soon figured out, the web was never going to match the eyeballs of a television show, anymore than a newspaper would. And with newspapers attracting audiences interested in all the sections of the paper, from the front page to the classifieds to the comics, no web site was equipped to compete.
Crash, bang, boom busted.
Slate and Salon survived. Newspapers and other media experimented restlessly with how to position themselves. And seven years ago, Matt Drudge posted Michael Isikoff's reporting on Monica Lewinsky when Newsweek was too shy to do so themselves and, essentially, launched what would soon be thought of as a blog revolution.
Blogs actually didn't exist as such when Matt dropped the black dress drip. As they came to life, they would almost always be identified as Personal Web Logs. But like the printing press - and even more, carbon paper and then the mimeograph and then the Xerox machine - the technology opened the door for people who were not code junkies to launch their own websites to express themselves as they wished.
Form was not function. Form is still not function. Those of us who toiled in the garden of the technologies learned this very quickly. Remember when chats were a burgeoning business? Yahoo! was a partner of ours back then and we were able to get major movie names to go on line while they were able to make deals to get everyone from Paul McCartney to Hanson to chat. And sometimes, when things went really well, 25,000 people would show up. 25,000! Wow. That's like getting the cover of Industrial Arms & Gardens!
Talent did the chats because they got a slot on the front page of Yahoo! for a number of hours, which meant millions, often tens of millions, would see their little billboard.
Yahoo! dropped chat about six years ago.
Gawker… before it was Gawker Media… was really the next generation of web excitement. Here were many very popular blogs out there by then. Folks like Mickey Kaus and Eugene Volokh (not to be mistaken for Eugene Volkoff, pro wrestler) and Instapundit were out there offering intelligent insights in the form of blogs, self-published and unrestrained except by their own judgments.
But it was Gawker that got the then-mainstream media's attention. It was gossip that made journalists hot.. just as Drudge had been… just as Aint It Cool News had been. And Nick Denton was smart enough to expand the brand. Wonkette was every bit as hot for Washingtonians. And then Defamer. The further the Gawker empire expanded, the more imitators were spurred on, some of quality, most not. But the more that was out there, the more difficult it was to be unique. Of course, as with then-mainstream media, the brand overcame the reality as often as not. Gossip wasn't gossip until it hit Page Six and now, gossip wasn't gossip until it hit a Gawker Media site.
But was this a revenue model? Well, yes. There is money in them there popular blogs. There is money on Salon.com and Slate and the online arms of major papers. But the question was and remains, how much money?
Unfortunately, because of my jury duty commitments, I will have to answer that question and others - like why what was Mainstream is now just Traditional Media and why do "they" hate the web and try to use the word "blogger" to diminish an entire delivery system - later. Watch for the rest of this Hot Button to pop onto the web tonight or on Saturday.
January 5, 2006 - The Business Of 2005, Pt 1
January 9, 2006 - The Business Of 2005, Pt 2
January 11 - Munich In Sequence | Act 1 | Act 2 | Act 3
January 12 - V For Vendetta
