Its been quite interesting watching the (internet) technology blogging glitterati having various crises of confidence over the last few weeks,
this one by Mr Scoble is the most heartfelt paean to date - to quote:
Tech blogging has become way too controlled by PR agents. You might not realize it, but the top blogs are contacted by PR folks dozens of times per day. This is why you’ll see 15 stories all appear on Techmeme at the same time. All with the same news. Only a few of whom slow down to ask “is this really useful.”
I think this depends on what sort of blog one is - those chasing shiny new things - gadgets, startups etc are going to be wooed by this sort of PR. Those reporting on business happenings will attract a different sort of PR. Those more interested in underlying trends and other more long term impacts, technologies etc are less likely to be interesting to PR.
Scoble then goes on to lament other failures in his eyes of technology blogging as a medium:
Our commenting systems really suck. I didn’t realize just how badly they sucked until I started using FriendFeed. My comments here are gummed up with moderation, with spam filters that only sorta work, that don’t have threading, and have many other problems ranging from needing to be signed into, to not working on mobile devices very well, to requiring you to enter weird numbers or do math just to be able to post a comment.
We focus on the latest, shiny object and don’t follow up. I see a few signs that’s changing, but it’s really hard to stay interested in stuff. I was talking with someone tonight who said Facebook seems to be fading from interest. I say they should go to Israel, like I did, or ask my wife. She’s thrilled with Facebook and keeps checking her wall. Me? Meh, off to the newest shiny thing.
We used to link to each other all the time, telling you when all the other cool bloggers have done something new and useful. Now? The top tier of bloggers that you are probably following are too busy to respond to their own inbound email (I’m not alone in that one) not to mention have time to read feeds from, gasp, other people’s blogs.
There’s simply too much content to read and watch. So, many of you just avoid us all together.
Ethics? I have seen some bloggers not disclose conflicts of interest. I always will, but not everyone you see on TechMeme lives by the highest of rules.
Also, many of us are very pro Apple, yet when I travel around the world I see far fewer Macs than I see when I go to, say, Gnomedex or other technology conferences that have lots of early adopters. So, we start talking about cool stuff that many of our readers don’t have access to.
Finally, I see a lot of blogs that tear down companies, people, or ideas. I remember when the blogs always just were trying to uplift each other and put interesting ideas forward.
Reading this list through, apart from the commenting issue (which is more of a blog platform issue, I expect most blog software will fix this over the next year or so) it is essentially a litany of those issues faced when something moves from being an "amateur" game done for fun, to a "pro" game done for money.
And this is where the unique economics of online media - of which the blogosphere is a large and thus very interesting early ecosystem - start to bite. There are 3 fundamental economic shifts that occur in online media:
(i) Cost of content creation has dropped, so barriers to entry for new writers have dropped - of the 70 million blogs out there, all will be good some of the time, so the days where the "established talent" was protected by access barriers are gone.
(ii) Cost of distribution is 2 orders of magnitude lower than print - so Broadstuff is as easy and cheap to distribute globally as TechCrunch or Scoble, they have few economies of scale.
(iii) Cost of aggregation has reduced as it is automated - Techmeme, Digg etc will pick up a good story from the edge rather than continue to point to the incumbents, so forward momentum needs continual effort
What this means is that the barriers to entry in online media are much lower, and the conditions for sustained advantage are much fewer and shorter in effect - thus the margins in online media are far lower, any surplus will rapidly be competed away.
The other impact of this lowering of entry barriers that the pro-blogger who wishes to monetise faces is that many of the new entrants are subsiding blogging for other benefits. Large numbers of new voices are heard in the space are not doing it directly for income (Broadstuff being a typical example - a niche consultancy now has a media arm in effect). Sarah Lacy notes the core issues well
in her post:
What about blogging as a loss-leader for a broader individual media portfolio? It occurs to me that my blog could become a larger part of my business without ever bringing in any direct revenue. Consider the role my blog plays in just building and sustaining an audience of interested readers—or "my brand" to use that over-used word we’re all beaten over the head with these days
And that excludes the legions of enthusiastic amateurs!
This combination of a low friction platform eroding any surplus, plus many of the entrants not caring if they make a surplus at all, puts huge pressure on those who would try to monetise their blogs - as Sarah notes:
Subscriptions are always an option, but typically a very bad one. There is so much solid free content online, it’s hard to get people to pay for a blog—hell, it’s hard to even get people to pay for the Wall Street Journal. In the print world, subscription fees frequently just pay the cost of getting the paper to you.
Advertising is an option, but a much over-subscribed one - there are too many pages chasing too little money. As with so much online media, Zipf's law (the few very rich blogs will get much richer) applies, leaving pennies for the others.
Given that there is little opportunity to increase price per unit, the only other option is to increase unit output and its timing - but as we have pointed out before, you now hit the limits of online "Freeconomics" - as yet, we are unable to increase the rate at which humans can churn out stories, one story at a time, or the hours in the day for them to do it. Reducing length, quality, wages etc have all been tried and found to have limits and its at those limits that many of the maladies Scoble describes exist.
So, big picture where does that leave us - is it potentially the scenario Sarah outlines?
So does the gulf just widen between the amateur bloggers and the larger, professional blogs that lose their sense of community, conversation, and--frequently—satisfaction? Is there a continual churn as A-list bloggers sell to larger companies or just burn out and fade away, only to have a newer hungrier, more rested crop take their place?
Sarah points out that this is not the case for the offset funded and / or smaller blogs, but for the many of larger ones I think it possibly is - in other words they will have to find some form of offset economic reason for existence of their own (eg
Digg wooing Google for example). Part of this of course is the inevitable winnowing process as an industry matures - few sectors retain more than 3 players sustainably.
I see the wails of anguish of Mr Scoble et al (and similar yesterday
from Loren Feldman) as early indicators of the zenith of the hypeside, and the beginning of the consolidation phase.
