Here's another profession that might disappear........

Steve Rubel wrote a post last Sunday about 3 professions that may disappear.....well, the warning shots are being fired on another one - A List Tech Blogger;

There have been rumblings on this from last week, with Mr Arrington of TechCrunch bemoaning the fact that other Tech Blogs are looking for funding (rather than letting him roll them up, it would seem). And this week came a post on ridiculous valuations - which, I note, none of them moved to question, some even letting it pass unchallenged

However, last night paidContent threw the gauntlet down bigtime, showing a switch to a "pro" organisation structure. This isn't prosumer blogging or citizen journalism no more, this is the starter gun for a straight race for market leadership of a media game.

And the issue at the core is simple - the only reason there are c 10 or so "A List, cover most everything in tech" blogs is because by and large they are using offset economics, ie they are publishing at under a sustainable economic cost. However, that means there is just a glut of people covering the same small set of stories to the same small, geeky audience - i.e. there is oversupply, and that means consolidation - there are very few commodity industries where more than 3 majors can make a living. So one thing is for sure, in a few years there will be far less of them.

And they won't be "bloggers" anymore either - one of the noticeable features of the big blogs is that they look less and less like blogs, and more like broadcast media they grew up to be an alternative to - the whole collaboration thing is winding down - linking is now strategic, there is less negative analysis, more PR stuff is going through to pimp up da volume, more journo staffers rather than tech idealists, etc etc

So not only will there be less, but those remaining won't look like the A list bloggers of yore anyway.

The issue they will face, though, is if they look like big media, talk like big media etc etc - will they be able to keep their audiences longer term?

One of the interesting lessons I took away from "Flat Earth News", Nick Davis' analysis of the failure of mainstream media over the last 20 years or so, is that its not a "single transaction" game - ie winning the battle of getting mo' content out there fastest, day after day, actually slowly leads to a drop in usage over time - you just can't fool all the people all the time with subpar content, and thats what you get with volume and low cost.

In fact, that's what gave blogging its "in" originally over Olde Media - it was seen as more authentic, because by and large it was written by enthusiasts with expertise and a genuine desire to tell it as it is - and talk to their audiences.

And those sorts of people are still out there, so the issue the New New Media may find, as they start to look more like Old New Media, is in this long tailed, low transaction cost world (Also, the arrival of aggregators of all sorts means that that "B, C and D list" blogs are increasingly easy to find and package), all that happens is that the fickle readership just follows the (socially mediated) crowd to the next tranche of genuine voices...

Update - as well as their comments below, Mike Butcher and Adam Tinworth pinged me on two other points:

- Mike thinks that the professional blogs are 'freer' as they end up hiring ad sales people so they don't have to run editorial and ads

- Adam thinks that my assumption that the tech market is near-saturated is wrong.

I'm not sure I'm disagreeing with Mike so much, more that I'm saying the blog media will have to differentiate themselves from the existing web 1.0 tech comment sites...and that sort of leads into Adam's points - ie is there a market that the existing tech websites don't occupy, and what will the A-List blogs have to do to differentiate themselves from the incumbents. Mike also brought up the intersting thought of Co-Opetition, which may occur (sparks thoughts of a post on Free-conomics) - though my bet would be on consolidation via acquistion after a shakeout, as that is a more common pattern.

Update 2 - an article in the NYT which is not saying things a million miles away from this post, albeit with a more tactical rather than strategic angle. Two quotes:

Mr. Arrington suggests he may well try to play the John D. Rockefeller of the blogging world (without the thugs and arsonists, presumably). “A lot of things will happen this year,” he said declining to offer more detail.

I think that's pretty much what my post is saying...and this from paidContent:

“Our focus is not page views,” Mr. Ali said. “Our focus has been laserlike on the C-level executives in the industry. That’s why we get triple-digit CPMs. That’s nearly unheard of in the industry.”

Now is that $100 CPM or $1.00 CPM