Blog subscriptions

Newly launched Blog Network charges you $3 a month to access its stable of blogs and publish your own. Bloggers get 50% of the take in proportion to their traffic. It’s a creative hybrid of hosting, subscriptions and revenue sharing. The post and comments over at Bill Quick’s site summarize the pros and cons.

My take: the blogmachine’s atomic-fusion-like power comes from cramming many minds into an open space and letting them interact with fervid recklessness. Barriers or impedances sap this power, so participants will find balancing public versus exclusive content to be a delicate job.

If enough people joined, the math might work. Assuming 1000 bloggers and 9,000 subscribers join, bloggers get to split a pot of $15,000 a month. A power law distribution (the norm for site traffic distribution) would yield roughly these results: 1 blogger gets $4,000 (net $3997), 10 get $400 (net $397), 100 get $40 (net $37), 1000 get $3 (netting 0.) The question for the 999 bloggers who don’t get to net $3997 will be, of course, what opportunity for ad revenue or fame has been lost by putting their best content inside the walled garden?

(8/29/02: Over at Bill Quick’s blog, the debate about the Blogging Network rages on like some Arizona forest fire. There’s also a good debate at Blogroots. I’m excited that Bill is now a Blogad beta user, selling his own ads. On her own blog, Joanne Jacobs tosses lukewarm water on any blogger’s chance of making money, then admits that both ideas tempt her. It’s early days for blogonomics. 8/30/02: Ken Layne notes, “I’ve already got a premium/free system. I sell articles and columns to publishers for money, and write for fun on this here site. And there’s a nice overlap — almost everything I’ve written for publication in the last year is the result of editors reading this site and offering some paying work.” And more Bill Quick readers battle each other over the issue here and here. 9/03/02 Bryan Preston compares Blogads to the Blogging Network. And I noticed that the Blogging Network provides a (new?) interesting page full of blogbites about remunerative blogging. I wonder why no mention of Blogonomics? Dave Copeland’s pre-launch thoughts about the network. Joanne Jacobs reports $0.30 for her first two days in the network. Not bad, since the membership is still small; but so is the competition. 9/06/02 John Scalzi notes, “A fair chunk of my income comes from people who found out about me through material on this site,” so putting information behind a fire-wall wouldn’t be worth risk.)