There is a quality about blogs which is worth more praise than it gets – the micro-audience. Whenever this blog has hit the heady heights of 300 visits (it varies from 75-100) a day, it has invariably been off the back of some hot-button issue that drags in people not interested in the arcane topics usually aired here.
The first time this happened I was quite excited. I repeated the topic and the site count bounced again. But we’re talking 300 people – not 300,000. I felt a fraud.
This blog serves as a kind of commonplace book. Being true to that purpose is an end in itself. It certainly doesn’t function as a financial enterprise, and I like that.
If you look at the New York Times piece Can Blogs Become A Big Source of Jobs?, you can see the depressing price of success:
Including bonuses, one popular entertainment writer, who is also an editor, makes in the neighborhood of six figures a year, said Jeremy Wright, chief executive of the network. The writer’s Lindsay Lohan site is consistently among the most popular, pulling in about 500,000 visitors a month.
Did the words “Lindsay Lohan site” give the game away? Yes, there’s gold in those blog hills, but the seams? They’re pretty seamy. Give me a micro-audience and freedom.
7 responses to “In praise of the micro-audience”
Adrian,
Nobody said every blog needed a massive audience or needed to be an enterprise. The best blogs are those written by truly passionate people – no matter what the topic or the size of the audience.
Are you having fun, expressing your passion, finding an audience, getting feedback and being part of a community? Then your blog’s a success.
Sure, it won’t pay your salary, but I’d wager that thought never even crossed your mind!
This member of the micro-audience approves of the site design tweak, but is missing Harry Evans at the top…
Jeremy – you’re absolutely right. Plus there’s the fun of seeing people respond in that community – and the disappointment of seeing them completely ignore you! But hey, that’s life.
Ken – is top left ok with you. I was sad to see Cyril Connolly go myself – but he sums up my feelings on blogging perfectly.
There will be plenty of money available for quality news blogs/sites once the best revenue models are found and advertisers acknowledge their value. Maybe we’ll never be able to compete in the area of sex, but we can certainly compete in the area of entertainment as long as we can convey the inherent drama in our stories. (Steve Boriss, The Future of News).
Bloomberg already does nicely out of subscription! I’m certainly happy to pay for content I like.
What intrigues me is where this all goes and whether it actually ends up with a situation that looks very much like where we started only with money ending up in the pockets of writers rather than shareholders – a trend I am firmly in favor of.
For example I wonder if all our “best” media blogs will end up under s single banner at some point in order to give us the scale to compete for ad money with mediaguardian et al.
In other words will blogging mimic almost every other industry in history where you start with many small firms until competition for revenue narrows the field over time to those few who can best attract customers or who would “die” apart but can thrive together.
I know that’s distorted by blogging being a hobby for most rather than a business. But still… Maybe new media isn’t such a new game after all.
John Duncan – Inksniffer
http://blog.inksniffer.com/
Hard to know John, but personally I think media blogs will either be Rafat Ali-style newsletter sites, or hobby blogs with bigger platforms able to dip in and out of hobby bloggers as they see fit (in a mutually beneficial way).