Gothamist: Blog Editor Foxy-Boxing

jake

Mon, 07 Feb 2005 08:25:54 -0500

>> Perhaps a local blog like MetBlogs or Gothamist can >> become an OK to nice business, like New York or >> Chicago magazine are, but when you limit them to >> local + a vertical you don't have a huge business. that sounds pretty good to me. maybe we won't be centimillionaires, but we'll be representing for our home town and producing something we love. i'm not sure why jason always makes that sound like failure.

Jason

Sat, 05 Feb 2005 14:38:43 -0500

>> Don't Launch 6 Blogs At Once. Weblogs Inc. has >> followed the launch-a-million-blogs-at-once >> strategy and has ended up with a few >> moderately-successful blogs and dozens of >> crappy-designed crappy-named blogs (TUAW?? >> Seriously?). TUAW has over 25,000 people a day coming to it already. TUAW stands for The Unofficial Apple Weblog, and four letter domains are hard to come by these days... so, I came up with TUAW and I agree it's got some flaws (i.e. how do you say it on the phone, but the site has amazing traffic and it will become the most popular Apple blog this year. Moderately successful? Really? Joystiq is the #1 games blog with five times the traffic of the next largest, Kotaku. Autoblog is the #1 car blog with 3-4x the traffic of the next largest, Jalopnik. Peter Rojas build Engadget to double the traffic of Gizmodo in just nine months. gizmodo had a like an 18 month google juice lead! Trust me, getting ahead of Nick who can spike any blog to 100,000 page views a day with a Fleshbot or Gawker link (and he does so every week) is NOT easy. Nick's was the original master of this game and keeping up with him--let alone beating him--is hard, hard work...he's got a lot of cash, great style, a PR machine, and years and years of google juice. so, if you thinking beating the master in all the blogs in which you are aligned is moderate success what is success??!?!?! What is very successful?!? We've got a whole stable of blogs with over 1M page views, a bunch with over 500,000, and we have 71 active bloggers in the network now. We have exactly the same traffic overall of Gawker in January--and we don't have a porn blog like Fleshbot as half our traffic!!! Sure, the ninche blogs are dull to people not into that niche... but as you can see from Gadling and Luxist we are learning about style and getting good domain names. I'm a quick study you know. :-) The truth is the market for things like Fishbowl and Gawker is tiny... Gawker makes 1/10th or 1/20th the amount as Gizmodo. Following Nick with Gawker is following Nick off a cliff. Nick does Gawker to have a tool to work the media... he gets to write about the people who write about him--that is brilliant. It's not a business. Local vertical sites are never going to get big or be big businesses. Trust me, I ran Silicon Alley Reporter which we NY+Internet as opposed to NY+Media and it became a huge local business with $12M in revenue at the peak. If you look at that number however, it was a lot of events and a lot of dotcom money which doesn't exist any more. Who is going to advertise on Gawker or FishbowlNY? I always do a test when I launch a brand... I look for the analog... and with Fishbowl and Gawker the analogs are Folio Magazine and Spy Magazine. I love(d) both but they both struggled and they both sucked as businesses--and they were national!!! Perhaps a local blog like MetBlogs or Gothamist can become an OK to nice business, like New York or Chicago magazine are, but when you limit them to local + a vertical you don't have a huge business. best j

Cam

Tue, 01 Feb 2005 02:44:42 -0500

p.s. If there is any weakness in MediaBistro's new FishbowlNY site, it's that it is called "fishbowlny.com" which is not a catchy, memorable, easy to brand name. Gawker is nice and simple, and catchy. Looking at all of the MediaBistro blogs, I would say that they have a problem coming up with good names for their blogs. On the other hand, Denton has an absolute 'nack' for coming up with, or finding people to come up with, catchy names. Knowing how to brand can be just as important as having good content. MediaBistro's blogs may have good content, but if they don't know how to brand and promote, it will be hard to make those blogs popular. I think instead of trying to build a quicky blog empire, MB should have focused on just a couple of blogs, and let Elizabeth build up a brand at MB 'first' then launch other blogs. I know time is of the essence, and they are trying to catch up, but having 6 weak blogs, is much worse than having two really strong blogs.

Cam

Tue, 01 Feb 2005 02:38:00 -0500

This is kind of a non-story, mostly to the benefit of MediaBistro. The fact is, Gawker is no longer really a media critique site, but more a place to point out quirky celebrity/media happenings/trends and joke about them. On the other hand, reading FishBowlNY, the first series of posts seem to be rather well formed media critique delivered with only a hint of humor. I didn't think I would, but I like FishbowlNY. For me, Gawker has become something akin to the Enquirer for those who want to pretend they are too high-brow for the actual Enquirer.

The DCeiver

Mon, 31 Jan 2005 14:52:24 -0500

In case I have your attention, Elizabeth, two questions: 1. Would it have KILLED you to have designed the Fishbooles with an eye toward something--ANYTHING, really--that didn't reveal intense Gawker-slash-Gothamist-envy? 2. Did you have to bring this pissing contest to Washington?

Captain Obvious

Mon, 31 Jan 2005 14:51:40 -0500

When all is said and done, most people don't care. EVen the people who used to care, don't care. At this point a "snarky" blog of media people gossiping about media people--or even a "non-snarky" one--is trivial at best. It's all mutual masturbation while starring at the other person in a mirror. Yes, Gawker does get millions of page-views a day. But the quality of the material has gone downhill. And it's basically the online equivalent of "Page 6" or a Cindy Adams column at this point. Speaking of which, I find it astounding that Nick Denton can be running the blogs he does--which are successful regardless of content issues--and still claim to have "no money" to pay his own staff. Anyone in publishing knows the publisher always cries "low funds" even when the money is being trucked in. But in this case it's a bit crass. My prediction for the future is some major financial guano hitting the fan at Nick Denton's fiefdom.

Peter Everhard

Mon, 31 Jan 2005 14:30:06 -0500

NEWS FLASH: It Ain't About Page Views I hate to cause problems by throwing "yellow snow realism" on this little debate. But, it ain't about pageviews. If it was about "page views", Craig Newmark would be married to Anna Nicole Smith right now (and he would look like Brad Pitt). The CEO of Montster.com made it clear to everyone some time ago that "what matters" is how many of the people camped out on your website are actually buying stuff on your website. See "I Am The Anti-Craig' http://www.tempcity.com/dramanyc/index.php?showtopic=3142 I seriously doubt Gawker Media makes money from people buying stuff on it websites. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Gawker Media's sole product is access to reporters. The day advertising see (or think) that reporters won't write something about them when they advertise on a Gawker Media blog, Gawker Media's revenue stream will disappear.

jake

Mon, 31 Jan 2005 12:16:02 -0500

thompson suggests that snark might be a little bit 2004- he thinks that duck and green peas catfood is the new new. he also pointed out to me that fishbowlny doesn't link to gothamist, which i thought was a hurtful thing to say.

Ellen

Mon, 31 Jan 2005 12:06:29 -0500

Hi Elizabeth, I hope you're not too offended by the "lying through your teeth". Most of what I write is meant to be humorous and not to be taken too seriously. I recognize that you do compensate for essays with AvantGuild memberships. What I meant to point out (and maybe I wasn't clear) was that on the boards you said that MB was not a media conglomerate and could not afford to pay its writers $1/word. This is similar to Nick's assertion that Gawker does not make much money and thus cannot pay their writers that much. Clearly I have not seen the finances of either of the companies, but I was suggesting that maybe you both could pay more. That you don't is fine - your original argument that there's plenty supply to fit the demand works for me. And Nick's writers happily take the low salaries for the exposure - that's fine too. I am just questioning the "We don't have enough money" argument. On the second point, perhaps you're right: there's not a precedent for this sort of thing and maybe two posts/day won't be that taxing. But given you won't be posting very much it's possible that Fishbowl won't be a Gawker-caliber blog. It may not be updated with the same frequency as Gawker and it may not be as funny. But who knows, your co-blogger could be a hilarious blogging machine. We'll have to see. Of course I'm just a pajama-wearing blogger. Jake, why don't you ask Thompson what he thinks?

jake

Mon, 31 Jan 2005 11:56:15 -0500

my role in this should be made clear: i added sixteen instances of the word "snark" to the original copy- i'm not sure it was enough.

Elizabeth Spiers

Mon, 31 Jan 2005 10:51:11 -0500

Ellen: A few points: 1) As I stated on the mb bulletin board (several times, but everyone conveniently ignored it), almost all of the content on mb is paid for. Most of it, in fact, is created in-house by my deputy editor, our two contributing editors, or myself. Also, I don't know you, so I can't be *too* offended by this, but "lying through my teeth?" What evidence is that accusation based on, exactly? 2) I have a co-blogger for the New York blog. I'm obligated to do, max, 2 posts a day. Not exactly a killer workload. And re: launching them all at once: given that only one person has tried it (Jason) and that Nick recently launched (successfully) 3 at once, I'd hardly say there's a precedent for failure. Is there a material difference between three and six? Maybe. I guess we'll see. It's all very throw-it-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks. And sure, it may all come slithering down in a pathetic little blob. Again, time will tell.

Jen

Mon, 31 Jan 2005 10:21:24 -0500

It was a collaborative effort; we've joined forces under "Gothamist" before.

Uncle Grambo

Mon, 31 Jan 2005 10:15:47 -0500

Great write-up, but what's with the post's author being the sorta anonymous "Gothamist"? C'mon Jake, fess up ... we know you wrote it. Bovs.