Business 2.0: Greg Lindsay’s piece on Nick Denton tries to be more of a story than it is:
“Any way you look at it, you have to conclude that Denton is wily. Consider his blog business model. A decade ago, media companies sank untold millions of dollars into building and staffing websites. Most of them are still in the red. It turned out that most Net users don’t want to pay for content, so new-media publishers had to rely on the trickle of revenue that came from online ads.
Denton learned from that debacle and embraced weblogs, which are the LEDs of the media firmament: They require almost no resources to run. His mini media empire, Gawker Media, has no offices, no proprietary technology, and no full-time employees, yet it can attract audiences big enough to generate ad revenue. Better still, the “content” is virtually free, since it consists of little more than snarky comments pointing to other sites (mostly newspapers and magazines) that do spend money or time creating content. It’s so dumb, it works: Denton’s blog model is leaner than a George Foreman turkey burger. And it’s apparently already returning a modest profit — with the potential to deliver substantially more within a few years.”
Lindsay goes on to speculate that Denton spends a few thousand bucks per month for each site and has a monthly audience of about 1.6 million readers with revenues of $250,000 a year–with potential to gross $1MM by 2005.
Here’s to ya, Nick! Many publishers must wish they had your(lack of) overhead and ability to hire colorful editorial talent and then NOT muzzle’em.
Business 2.0: Greg Lindsay’s piece on Nick Denton tries to be more of a story than it is:
“Any way you look at it, you have to conclude that Denton is wily. Consider his blog business model. A decade ago, media companies sank untold millions of dollars into building and staffing websites. Most of them are still in the red. It turned out that most Net users don’t want to pay for content, so new-media publishers had to rely on the trickle of revenue that came from online ads.
Denton learned from that debacle and embraced weblogs, which are the LEDs of the media firmament: They require almost no resources to run. His mini media empire, Gawker Media, has no offices, no proprietary technology, and no full-time employees, yet it can attract audiences big enough to generate ad revenue. Better still, the “content” is virtually free, since it consists of little more than snarky comments pointing to other sites (mostly newspapers and magazines) that do spend money or time creating content. It’s so dumb, it works: Denton’s blog model is leaner than a George Foreman turkey burger. And it’s apparently already returning a modest profit — with the potential to deliver substantially more within a few years.”
Lindsay goes on to speculate that Denton spends a few thousand bucks per month for each site and has a monthly audience of about 1.6 million readers with revenues of $250,000 a year–with potential to gross $1MM by 2005.
Here’s to ya, Nick! Many publishers must wish they had your(lack of) overhead and ability to hire colorful editorial talent and then NOT muzzle’em.