Looking beyond the twilight of the blogs

[Graphic courtesy of Yahoo's Bradley Horowitz at Elatable.com]



Slate magazine today is running an article titled "Twilight of the Blogs", arguing that all the signs are in place to say that blogging is topping out from a business point of view. A couple data points in it:

The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that "with traditional and electronic publishers keen to get their hands on Internet-advertising properties, Daily Candy could fetch more than $100 million" (my italics). Twenty-eight times your money in less than 28 months? For a business that takes in less than $20 million a year?

....

Pajamas Media: Last November, the collection of right-wing blogs (with a few lefties thrown in for laughs) grandly announced the closing of a $3.5 million round of venture capital financing. Roger Simon, the screenwriter-turned-blogger who is the CEO of the enterprise, promised "to change the way people report and access news and commentary." I don't know. It looks to me like a bunch of blogs with their own logo.

Daily Candy's valuation is clearly nuts -- but then again, so was Time Warner's acquisition of AOL. And Pamajas Media? Who knows -- venture capital is supposed to invest in high-risk investments for high rewards. But the folks I keep an eye on are those that keep working hard, writing well, and creating new ideas for others to read and build upon. If I think about a very elegant article just posted today by Bradley Horowitz of Yahoo, I look for the one percent of the population that has a passion for creating content, the Creatives. In other words, I'm interested in the peak of the pyramid. Those people will always find an audience and the Internet simply makes it easier for them to reach that audience.

So is blogging topping out? I don't think so, but the blogging bubble may be. But there are a billion Internet users out there looking for content online. That makes the market for creative content bigger every day. Any market with a billion customers is an interesting business, whether Wall Street thinks it is or not. So the real question is not whether this is the twilight of the blogs, but rather whether it is actually the dawn.

Technorati Tags: Blogs, Business, Consumers, Creatives, Daily Candy, Dawn of the blogs, Media, New media, Pajamas Media, Publishing, Publishing 2.0, Slate, Synthesizers, Twilight of the blogs