{"id":372,"date":"2004-05-22T16:36:39","date_gmt":"2004-05-22T23:36:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stefangeens.com\/?p=372"},"modified":"2004-05-22T16:36:39","modified_gmt":"2004-05-22T23:36:39","slug":"commodifying-denton-cont","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/2004\/05\/commodifying-denton-cont\/","title":{"rendered":"Commodifying Denton, Cont."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One thing I glossed over in my <a href=\"http:\/\/www.stefangeens.com\/000389.html\">previous post<\/a> on business models for blogs, now that I think about it, is that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nickdenton.org\/\">Nick Denton<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.weblogsinc.com\/\">Jason Calacanis<\/a> do provide one service that individual bloggers trying to monetize their readership don&#8217;t have easy recourse to: By owning the revenue stream of multiple blogs, Denton and Calacanis spread their risk, and so can offer their talent a measure of job security. Denton pays a salary, while Calacanis lets you keep the first $1000 profit your site makes from the ads he sells and 50% beyond that, if I remember <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gothamist.com\/archives\/2004\/05\/04\/ny_bloggers_thank_you.php\">the NY bloggers talk<\/a> correctly.<\/p>\n<p>This is similar to how venture capitalists operate, except that real VC projects involve large sunk costs. With blogs, the only non-negligible costs are bloggers&#8217; wages and the effort expended trying to sell readerships to advertisers. Depending on how aggressive Denton and Calacanis are in weeding out underperforming blogs, the cost of failure can be quite low, and hence also their overall risk, leaving them with a generous upside. It&#8217;s the size of this upside we&#8217;re all wondering about.<\/p>\n<p>Felix <a href=\"http:\/\/www.memefirst.com\/000523.html\">points out<\/a> it&#8217;s easy for Denton to fire a blogger. But the same is true for Calacanis. Should he decide to jettison a blogger, I believe all he needs to do is mail him a CD with his aggregated content and restart the blog with a new face<span class=\"sg-marginalia-100\">So, Felix, basically you&#8217;re wrong.<\/span>. I don&#8217;t think either venture blogger (VB?) could or should do this without good reason, though, lest the stable get antsy. Their talent musn&#8217;t live in fear that a stale patch after a good run lands them out on the street.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One thing I glossed over in my previous post on business models for blogs, now that I think about it, is that Nick Denton and Jason Calacanis do provide one service that individual bloggers trying to monetize their readership don&#8217;t &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/2004\/05\/commodifying-denton-cont\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-372","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-technology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7eNhC-60","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=372"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}