Daniel Gross (Slate): Twilight of the Blogs – Are they over as a business? As a cultural phenomenon, blogs are in their gangly adolescence. Every day, thousands of people around the world launch their blogs on LiveJournal or the Iranian equivalent. But as businesses, blogs may have peaked. There are troubling signs—akin to the 1999 warnings about the Internet bubble—that suggest blogs have just hit their top.
It’s obvious that there’s been way more hype lately than is healthy. But the entry of Big Media into the blogging space is not a sign of impending doom.
If Time Warner and other big-media companies start a bunch of sucky blogs, they won’t get anywhere. If they buy a bunch of great blogs and turn them into sucky ones, ditto.
But the barrier to entry is sufficiently low — and the number of talented people who want their voices to be part of the conversations continues to grow — that competition will stay pretty fierce for readers. That does suggest, perhaps, a more realistic view of the business possibilities. But blogs and their brethren are far from over. They’re really just getting started in world where the conversation is the thing.
on Feb 17th, 2006 at 3:14 pm
The blog is dead, long live the blog! Anti-blog hype is overblown…
Oh boy this is going to stir things up. Daniel Gross of Slate writes in Twilight of the Blogs that business blogs are on the ……
on Feb 17th, 2006 at 7:06 pm
[…] On Slate today Daniel Gross wonders whether we’re seeing the end of the business of blogs. Looking over his shoulder at the bubble that ended the dotcom days, and seeing the buzz that’s been building in the blogsphere, I suppose it’s natural for him to wonder: now that the hype has moved in, has hope moved on? Well, as Mark Evans points out, no – there may be a surplus of features and a deficit of actual business models, and the big M&A buyers and VCs may have itchy trigger fingers, but things are still just starting to get interesting around here. […]
on Feb 18th, 2006 at 11:00 am
The future of blogs as businesses will be in consolidation
Two things will stay the same- a. there are millions of people looking for good content. b. There are a number of good people who want and can write original content and blog is currently their most efficient way to do it.
So the question is – what is the best way to bring the people who write good content in front of the people who look for the good content in a much more complex and large environment than today’s.
The answer is consolidation. Good bloggers will realize they fight for readers and join under a common roof to bring synergy for the readers. And readers will flock to these collaborative blogs / Magazines because it solves their problem of finding what’s interesting.
Linkadelic Magazine/
on Feb 19th, 2006 at 2:22 pm
东拉西扯：Blog首先不是商业…
我坚信，blog从来不是为了商业而存在的，它满足了普通人自我表达和沟通的需要，它的商业价值也首先来自这里。认真满足用户，做好服务的BSP和其他商业公司，必定会从中获得丰厚的回报…