A blogger sweatshop was virtually raided this week after rumblings that AOL asked several contributors to their weblog network to stop posting until budgets were back on track for August. Yet, according to reports, some kept posting on their own accord for free. Their presumed willingness to weather out an advertising downturn-induced drizzle might help them keep their $15-per-item arrangements with AOL after the big hailstorm hits.
Around the same time, Jeremy Wright, the 29-year-old CEO of Toronto-based b5media — currently boasting over 350 individually-branded blogs in its stable — was making a public overture on his personal site to take over 105 totally obscure business blogs from Orange County-based network Know More Media, after the company announced an imminent shutdown due to their inability to generate more than marginal revenues overall.
Could it be that, no matter how low the overhead — or how low the readership expectations — most potential weblog topics are not worth the effort of trying to seriously monetize?
Well, the idea of banding together blogs on a few hundred different topics earned b5media $2 million in equity financing in October 2006 — about a year after Wright and four partners threw around $100 each into setting up a few tech, videogame and gadget sites as building blocks for a blog network, a concept that seemed to sink or swim based on the personality of the publisher.
Gawker Media was the first, balancing tabloid gossip with obsessive geekery, cultivated through the unique Fleet Street business journalism sensibilities of its founder, Nick Denton. A would-be rival, Weblogs, Inc., kicked into gear by poaching the editor of Denton’s first site Gizmodo; the resulting product, Engadget, was presumed to be the main motivation for purpose-starved AOL shelling out $25 million to take an entire stable of blogs off the hands of relentless self-promoter Jason Calacanis.
Meanwhile, the tangled web of bloggers dedicated to blogging about what one another is saying — whether to give kinetic credibility to their consulting businesses or as lazy fodder for corporate journalism — has also helped develop its own system of unlikely stars.
Three or four years ago, Wright had a knack for earning attention in those emerging circles. He got fired for blogging about frustrations while toiling in IT management for the Red Cross, he auctioned off his blog on eBay, and he was allegedly once refused entry to the United States after stating his profession as “blogger.”
Naturally, these events were posted about in detail by Wright, then regurgitated in enough places to make him a micro-celebrity to those paying attention.
“It wasn’t an intentional effort to make a name for myself,” he says. “I just consider myself an open person. Today, I’m happier working behind the scenes.
“I think like anyone in their mid-20s I was more inclined to snap judgments and attitude than I am now. I’ve gone from just talking about stuff to getting it done.”
Lately, that’s meant trying to establish b5media on the start-up scene, which remains something of a non-starter in Canada, with no utilities emerging as a mass-appeal breakthrough — if not for lack of trying.
But the network of b5 blogs are designed to be as international as possible, with editorial staff around the globe, all aiming to score respectably in web searches which, in turn, fuel advertising dollars.
“We cover everything but politics, sex and religion,” explains Wright. So, what’s left? A dozen different vertical channels: Beauty & Style, Business, Celebrities, Entertainment, Health & Wellness, Lifestyles, Music, Sports, Technology, Travel & Culture and Video Games. (A twelfth category, Team Blogs, consists of staffer sites.) “The writers have to have their own style,” says Wright. “This isn’t Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism, but it needs to be good enough to engage the reader with pictures, access and coverage.”
A couple years into the venture capitalist-funded effort, the company boasts an infrastructure designed to keep contributors on point, even supplying them with a blogging manual. Wright says the ones that aren’t pulling their weight in generating reader traffic are given a month probation to clean up their act, with help from an editor, estimating that 20 per cent of bloggers to date haven’t worked out as hoped. While the application process for b5media was originally open to anyone, Wright claims that of 200 daily inquiries, only a small fraction looked qualified enough to even consider. Blogger recruitments are now done via referral.
The degree to which money provides an incentive for the effort is subject to interpretation, though.
Generally, a starter blog job with b5 pays $2-300 for 24 posts per month, which Wright estimates to constitute a $20-30/hour gig. The most ambitious of the stable of bloggers are nonetheless limited to around four blogs each, while each category has its own manager.
And with contributors stationed around the world — a gadget blogger in Indonesia is more likely to glimpse unique developments before one who is based on these shores — the currency can have a greater worth.
Weblogs, Inc., by contrast, initially offered between $3-500 on the condition of delivering 125 posts per month — helping to build a business ultimately sold to AOL. Gawker Media recently switched to a more complex incentive-based system that helped generate more pageviews, an experiment successful enough to force the payments to lower, although the assumption is that their full-time bloggers now earn a competitive salary — as Gawker sites have proven to offer a gateway to a mainstream media job.
“We came along and flipped both models on their head,” says Wright, adding that a b5media blog remains “much more about the writer than at some place like Gawker.”
But it’s not about deep reporting, or self-indulgence, or the elitist quasi-literary pretensions that still apparently make even the lowest-paying old-media career enticing for some.
Does it matter for a network trying to cultivate what seems to be a worldwide version of community-oriented news-you-can-use? Yet, in the fishwrapsphere, this grist remains the most lucrative.
Launch a million little niches and, regardless of the quality of the item — just as likely recycled from a press release delivered via Google News Alert — there’s going to be somebody searching for something on each one. This might be a slow season for Aguilera Buff, Fergie Freak, or Hilary News, but that’s sure to be offset by hype-induced traffic at Light the Torch, Wii News Daily, or iPhone 24x7. This week, b5 boasted eight sites on a ranking of the top 100 health and medicine blogs.
“We might not come out on top of search results about Lindsay Lohan,” says Wright, even if they aspire nonetheless. “We can for someone looking up information on macrobiotic cooking, or kids with autism, or cricket results from India.
“This kind of thing isn’t necessarily being written for some tech blogger working in Silicon Valley.”
For the past few years, it seems an integral part of Web 2.0 was figuring out how to feed that fray, even if you had nothing new to add to the conversation. Wright was actually operating off the radar of leading industry monitor Techcrunch until April, when “secret merger talks” between b5media and diminished blog search engine Technorati were reported to have “blown up” amidst efforts to raise more cash.
Such drama remains intriguing to anyone who followed the colossal implosions of the first dot-com bubble. But tech bloggers also risk realizing that a fixation with every insider belch can be a waste of pixels — this week’s debut of Cuil, a search engine-as-blockbuster flop, might confirm that doomsday 2.0 has arrived.
“I don’t think it’s any different than the echo chamber in the overall news media,” counters Wright. “The smaller publications feed off the bigger ones. Maybe it seems repetitive because there isn’t a Daily Show or Colbert Report equivalent where people can let off steam. But the concept of a real scoop in this world hardly even exists anymore.”
Damage control for AOL has involved a tightly-managed conference call where their long-suffering bloggers were apparently reassured that the future looks really bright, despite every indication that it's anything but.
Wright’s response to recent developments involved a lengthy blog post, contemplating how a blog network can survive a slump, even offering suggestions for those who want to start their own.
“There isn’t much innovation during a downturn anyway,” he says. “This is a really exciting time to show we have the systems, the process, the partnership and tools to do this better, faster and cheaper with regular people. If we keep hitting targets, there’s no reason we won’t keep surviving, and thriving.”
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