Will Blog for Cash

A webby lament

Over a year ago, I wrote a column about my eager participation in what I called the Blogger revolution. "Bloggers", for the uninitiated, are people who maintain a web-log, i.e. a chronological diary of thoughts, argument, musings or whatever, on their own website, with links to other sites and oodles of commentary besides. It's a revolution because anybody now has the means to broadcast anything to anyone in the world, as long as they have a basic computer, a modem and access to the internet. In the past, in comparison, if you wanted to get published, you needed a newspaper or magazine or access to a printing press; you had to get past editors, agents, media proprietors, and on and on. It was a gruelling and difficult process making your way as a writer - and some of that grimness made you a better one. But now, all that has changed, in what is arguably the most significant media revolution since the arrival of television. It takes a few minutes to set up your own "blog" - just click on www.blogger.com and you'll have one in no time - and you can publish anything you can conceivably want to a readersip that has no physical boundaries whatsoever. My own modest little venture, imaginatively called www.andrewsullivan.com, is now around two years old. I've written tens of thousands of words; I've made hundreds of new web-friends; I get around 400 emails a day. I have to say I've never enjoyed myself as much as a journalist, had as much impact with my writing, or had as much sheer fun as a commentator on things large and small.

But it's also true - and here's the catch - that this wonderful experiment has yet to make me any significant financial return. Despite what the New Statesman just called the "astonishing influence" of my site, it pays next to nothing. Readers have generously sent in donations over the last two years, and they have largely paid off my debts in setting the thing up, and continue to defray the ever-growing server costs. Unlike almost every other new media entity, then, andrewsullivan.com is a big success. But it still requires my working essentially for free. Other online sites have lost a fortune or are barely keeping afloat. Slate.com is doing relatively well, but it's backed by the huge resources of Microsoft and the invaluable portal of the MSN home page. Even so, it's still no money-maker. Salon.com is a great forum but it's now a penny stock and has had to ask readers to subscribe to keep it afloat. Other sites - like online versions of the political weeklies - are essentially dependent on old media entities to keep them afloat. One of the best of the free blogs, Arts and Letters Daily, a wonderfully eclectic digest of literary, political and philosophical debate, just went under a week ago. My own blog only stays alive because I'm not paid for the actual work of putting content on the site. I donate my time as a writer - 2 or 3 hours a day - for the sheer love of it.

Whatever else it is, this isn't much of a business model. I pay my mortgage by writing for the old media - for this beloved paper, for the New Republic magazine, for Time, and other outlets that do the old-fashioned thing and provide remuneration for work. And yet, for all its economic dysfunction, the new medium has never been as powerful as it is today. In fact, I wonder if there's ever been a technological innovation that has combined such extraordinary new power with such dramatically poor financial rewards.

Last month, for example, the New York Times passed a media milestone. The numbers of visitors to its website for the first time eclipsed its regular circulation on dead trees. On average, 1.28 million people logged on to nytimes.com each day in September. The weekday circulation of the Times, in comparison, is 1.2 million a day. If current trends continue, it won't be long before the internet Times is read by far more people than read the paper version. My own far more modest traffic numbers tell a similar story. I'm one of a handful of big blogs on the web, and get over 20,000 daily readers, readers who often come back more than once a day for updates. Last week, for example, my site was visited 237,000 times; and, on current trends, October could well break the million monthly visit mark for the first time. Compare that to the reach of, say, the esteemed political weekly I edited for five years, The New Republic. It delivers around 90,000 dead-tree copies a week; a single article in it, if it's popular, might just get read by, say, 200,000 people. After a couple of years, the new medium's reach is beginning to equal, if not eclipse, the old. But at least the old media paid me.

The web readers - to add to the paradox - are also valuable ones. Take the New York Times. In a recent survey, reported by blogger Henry Copeland, the Times found that the typical reader of its paper version is 50 years' old, while the typical reader of the Times online is 35. 85 percent of the online Times' readers are outside the new York metropolitan area, while a mere 20 percent of the paper-readers are. A survey of my own site found that around half were under 40 - an astonishingly young readership for political commentary. These readers should be lucrative for advertizers, and yet ad revenue online is essentially dead.

What gives? Part of it might be fallout from the tech recession. Perhaps ad revenues will revive in time, and I'll be rich before you know it. But we may have, I think, what one Internet writer recently called an air and gold problem. Air is much more vital to human beings than gold; but because there's so much air out there and all of it is readily available, it's free. Gold, on the other hand, is immeasurably less useful to human life than oxygen and yet its scarcity makes it a benchmark for financial value. In a way similar to air, internet sites are so boundlessly plentiful and the expense of running them so tiny compared to, say, producing and distributing millions of heavy newsprint-laden newspapers, that you can't talk people into paying for them. Besides, the minute you do, and set up barriers for non-payers, you lose part of what makes these sites work. A critical part of the web is the ability to link to other sites and articles freely and often. If half these sites are closed to non-subscribers, then they essentially shut themselves off from the broader web conversation. But being part of that broader conversation is what gives blogs their unique and fascinating appeal. They can make arguments, fact-check them, rebut them, and on and on - in a seamless and endless conversation that's often riveting to eavesdrop on. Putting up propietary fences, turn-stiles and toll-booths essentially robs the web of what makes it so superior to the older media.

So are we stuck? I frankly don't have a clue. and don't believe any expert who says he does. they've all been wrong so far. But the most obvious scenario for profitability may be the way in which the economics of writing on the Internet will become enmeshed in new and interesting ways with the old media. Take a classic example - Glenn Reynolds. He's a law professor at the University of Tennessee and not so long ago respected but somewhat unknown academic. But since launching hs amateur weblog, Instapundit.com, he has leaped to the top of the internet pile. With all that exposure, he now has a column on another website, TechCentral Station, and can be seen contributing to other papers, such as the Wall Street Journal. My own blog has allowed me to produce a weekly version, which I have been able to sell to a couple of dead-tree newspapers for some cash. Items on my site are sometimes noticed by old media editors who ask me to expand on them for a column or essay. Last year, I started an online book club, where readers collectively buy a new book, read it and then discuss it online with the author. The site gets a small commission every time we sell such a book on Amazon.com, and the commissions can add up. Last week, Christopher Hitchens' new book, "Why Orwell Matters," was our choice for the month, and its Amazon ranking went in a few hours from 1074 to number 3. Every little counts. Pretty soon, I hope to be selling-shirts and coffee mugs. And when I write another book, my site will doubtless be a great way to promote it.

In other words, the new media's power may well be kept afloat by the old media's economic model. It wasn't supposed to be like this in the heady days of the web revolution. Once upon a time, AOL was going to save Time Warner, remember? These days, it's Time Warner that is keeping AOL above the water line. But this too is part of the internet adventure. It has whiplashed our expectations more than once already and will doubtless do so again. The joy of it is that we still don't know where it's headed; but we're absolutely intent on enjoying the ride. So what if it isn't a money-maker yet? The writing's the thing. And if cash is your primary goal in life, you shouldn't have become a writer in the first place. Meanwhile, please log on. And, if you feel like it, throw some money in the tip-jar.

October 13, 2002, Sunday Times of London copyright © 2002 Andrew Sullivan

-- Anonymous, October 16, 2002