Pay Per Blog: What Killer Business Model?
By DONNA BOGATIN • Apr 6th, 2008 • Category: BIG PICTUREMarc Andreessen takes to his blog for a top ten parody of a New York Time’s story on a “Web world of 24/7” blogging, but falls short by one “comic” headline: “Create your own celebrity blog in 60 seconds.”
While Andreessen’s blog.pmarca.com seeks to share real-world insights gleaned from years of entrepreneurial experience, his celebrity blogging has precious little in common with “digital-era sweatshop” conditions portrayed by the NYT.
Andreessen is obviously not a writer that “blogs till he drops”; He does not have the economic necessity to do so and apparently does not have the inspiration either, given his propensity for cutting and pasting the writing of others.
CNET’s ZDNet blogger-in-chief, Larry Dignan, also ridicules Matt Richtel’s NYT piece, mocking what he deems to be the newspaper of record’s “straightforward three makes a trend journalism.” Dignan ought to know, both he and Richtel apparently perfected such “journalism” skills at Columbia University.
Richtel’s University of California at Berkeley training also proudly informs his writing: He “studied rhetoric” there.
Dignan‘s blogging rhetoric “didn’t make the cut” for the NYT story, he confides, sharing a wholesome tale of how he won’t meet the fate of two pay per blog ZDNet writers because he exercises daily and attends to an infant. Dignan’s message to “fellow” bloggers:
The point I was trying to make was that nothing (certainly the deaths of Russell and Marc Orchant and Om’s heart attack) exist in a vacuum. You have to take care of yourself.
Dignan’s cavalier “if you’re stressed out over 5,000 RSS feeds chances are good you’d be stressed by any profession you choose, not only doesn’t “make the final NYT story,” it demonstrates his lack of perspective for the fundamental business model differences between his salaried, sure-thing, CNET corporate “blogging” versus the cavalier pay per blog labor of the ZDNet stable of writers.
Of course “you can’t pin two deaths and a heart attack solely on blogging,” as Dignan says.
You also “can’t” deny, however, that Dignan’s guaranteed CNET paycheck and health benefits that he can count on week in, week out, regardless of page views his writing generates (or doesn’t), makes his “blogging” chores a lot less stressful than those of writers that continue to toil under a variable, uncertain, benefits-free, CNET-centric, ZDNet blog network business model.
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DONNA BOGATIN is the Founder & CEO of STARTUP ALPHA
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