Jason Calacanis mentioned in his blog that aside from WIN blogs and Gawker blogs, there are no other top blogs out there, and even cited b5media as a well-funded network without a carrier blog anyone can name (well, maybe except for Problogger.net or the other acquired blogs including one of our very own editors here, Tony’s Deep Jives Interest).
b5media CEO Jeremy Wright blogs back and explains why his media network does not have top guns, adding the fact that their model is different from what Jason or Nick treaded on. The question of one big blog vs. a dozen smaller blogs was raised and Jeremy clarifies their business approach.
It is hard to compare a single popular blog against a score of medium-to-small blogs in a certain niche. However, business and operation-wise, the single popular blog approach will have some definite advantage.
- Technically, it’s easier to manage since there’s only one blog to take care of.
- Fewer bloggers needed to run it. If you have 15 small blogs, you need at least (or around) 15 bloggers to write for all of them. A single popular blog can have 3 or 4 doing rotations. That also means you have fewer people on the payroll.
- You have a single ad folio. Selling one huge blog to advertisers is easier than a group of smaller ones. You also attract bigger clients. How else can you get bigwigs like Intel, Microsoft or Apple to advertise on your blog?
- First to exclusives. Obviously, the popular blog will have more access to exclusives or scoops and the smaller ones will be left feeding off the news that the big one got (though this is not always the case). Remember the Engadget-Gizmodo traffic charts during iPhone day?
This is not to say that the b5media model is not a sound model. It’s an interesting one, IMO. The fact that they got funding for this idea is enough proof that there is promise in the community play model. It’s success will ultimately measured on how the community play can be cohesive enough to highlight the channel and not the individual blog. But, what if one of the blogs do become popular?
