Editor’s note (April 2026): This article is part of Blog Herald’s editorial archive. Originally published in September 2005, it has been reviewed and updated to ensure accuracy and relevance for today’s readers.
In 2005, something was happening in the blogosphere that felt, to those paying attention, like the early rumblings of a media earthquake.
Blog networks — coordinated collections of owned-and-operated blogs operating under a single brand — were proliferating fast. So fast, in fact, that Blog Herald has created a list of 36 blog networks that September, a number that had grown significantly in just a few months.
The list included names like Gawker Media, Weblogs Inc., b5media, Corante, and Creative Weblogging — alongside dozens of smaller, regional, and language-specific networks spanning Italian, German, Dutch, Spanish, Russian, and Indonesian publishers.
It was a moment that seemed to promise a new architecture for independent media. It didn’t quite turn out that way. But the story of what those networks were trying to do — and why most of them eventually failed or were absorbed — is more instructive now than ever.
What blog networks were actually trying to build
The logic behind blog networks in 2005 was sound. Solo bloggers were gaining audiences, but they had no infrastructure: no advertising sales teams, no editorial support, no shared hosting, no brand identity beyond their own name. A network solved all of that. Writers got a platform and a revenue share; the network got content and traffic; advertisers got scale.
Weblogs Inc., founded by Jason Calacanis, was the gold standard. It launched vertical blogs across tech, gaming, food, and celebrity coverage, eventually selling to AOL for a reported $25 million in 2005 — the same year that list of 36 networks was compiled. Gawker Media, Nick Denton’s operation, was taking a different and sharper editorial line, building a stable of properties like Gizmodo, Kotaku, and Lifehacker that would define online media voice for a decade.
These weren’t hobbyist blogs with ambitions. They were early prototypes of what we now call digital media companies.
The structural problem nobody wanted to talk about
For all the momentum, most of those 36 networks on that 2005 list are gone. Not just quieter — gone. The reasons vary by network, but a few patterns repeat.
First, the economics were fragile. Display advertising was the primary revenue model, and CPMs for blog content were always lower than for premium editorial. As programmatic advertising matured and Google tightened its grip on the ad stack, the margin that had made networks viable largely evaporated.
Second, platform dependency proved fatal for many. Networks that built their distribution on early RSS aggregators, MSN, or Yahoo partnerships found themselves exposed when those relationships changed. Traffic that looked owned was often borrowed. This is a lesson the creator economy is still learning — painfully — every time an algorithm update reshuffles the deck.
Third, the talent model was difficult to sustain. Writers who built real audiences often outgrew the network model and went independent. Networks that relied on low-paid, high-volume contributors found that quality degraded over time, making it harder to justify continued ad spend.
What survived, and why it matters
The properties that endured from that era weren’t necessarily the ones with the most networks or the most blogs. They were the ones with genuine editorial identity and, crucially, direct audience relationships.
Gawker Media’s legacy lives on in several of its former properties, now under different ownership. SB Nation, which appeared on that 2005 list as “SBNation,” evolved into Vox Media — one of the more durable digital publishing groups to emerge from the blog era. Seeking Alpha, which made the list as a financial blogging network, is still operating today, having found a durable niche among retail investors and market analysts. These survivors built something the others didn’t: a reason to come back that wasn’t just about recency or volume.
The pattern is worth noting. What distinguished the survivors was not technical infrastructure or funding — it was editorial coherence. They knew what they stood for, and that gave them something to protect when the monetization models shifted.
The creator economy is living this history on a loop
Today’s landscape of newsletters, podcast networks, YouTube channels, and Substack publications is structurally different from those 2005 blog networks — but the underlying tensions are familiar. The question of whether to go independent or join a platform or collective is one that content creators still navigate daily. The promise of infrastructure, distribution, and monetization in exchange for content is still the deal on offer, whether it’s a podcast network, a media collective, or a creator fund.
What’s changed is the awareness of risk. Creators who’ve watched platform after platform restructure its monetization — YouTube, Patreon, Medium, Twitter — have a harder-won skepticism that 2005 bloggers largely lacked. The bloggers who joined networks in 2005 often did so with genuine optimism about what those networks would become. The ones who later regretted it had usually made a structural mistake: they had built on someone else’s foundation without securing their own audience first.
The lesson that doesn’t age
Looking back at that list of 36 blog networks — representing publishers in at least six languages, from Indonesia to Germany to Russia — what stands out isn’t the ambition. It’s how quickly the landscape that seemed so solid became unrecognizable.
The most durable piece of advice from that era is also the most boring: own your list, own your domain, own your relationship with your readers. Networks can amplify that. They can’t replace it. Every blogging generation seems to learn this the hard way, and there’s no reason to think the current one will be different — unless creators go in with their eyes open to what they’re trading and what they’re keeping.
The blogosphere of 2005 was electric with possibility, and that energy wasn’t wrong. The networks that came and went during that period weren’t failures of ambition. They were, mostly, failures of structure — and that’s the part worth studying.
