Comments on: Denton: Evil genius or just plain evil?

By: JoeDuck

JoeDuck — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 00:44:38 +0000

… whether it encourages bloggers to go for the cheap and titillating is the subject of debate

Well, maybe a dummy debate. Gawker writers are masters of the cheap and titillating and are paid well to be that. There are flashes of brilliance here and there but we are not talking about a journalistic high road here.

Valleywag is no… http://www.MathewIngram.com!

By: Daniel Gibbons

Daniel Gibbons — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 02:41:10 +0000

I didn't say “low barrier to entry”, but “lower barriers to entry”, which is much more than just semantics. I was saying “lower” relative to what it would have taken to start a competitor to a major publishing property in the 1980s. It's gone from “virtually impossible unless you're already vastly wealthy” to merely “very difficult”…

And as to the reason why a bunch of bloggers haven't cut out Nick Denton, well that will almost certainly happen, as it does in virtually every creative industry. And they'll go on to form their own network, which in turn will be criticized for exploiting the poor old bloggers who work for it rather than own it.

Denton has momentum and a critical mass of readers, but these aren't things that are necessarily related to how much capital you have at your disposal.

By: Seth Finkelstein

Seth Finkelstein — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 21:11:30 +0000

“barriers to his bloggers going off and starting their own equivalent networks …”

I think you've been taken in by the mythology here. The cuckoo-clock repeating of “Low barrier to entry! Low barrier to entry!” seems to have as much factual basis behind it as that cuckoo. Because if it were really true, why haven't a bunch of bloggers simply cut out Nick Denton ?

By: mathewi

mathewi — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 02:17:03 +0000

I agree, Daniel. I think Nick's model makes a lot of sense, and for
the most part it seems to be paying off — and not just for him, but
for lots of his bloggers as well.

By: Daniel Gibbons

Daniel Gibbons — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 01:23:01 +0000

“If you're a blogger at an established site like Gawker, it's quite obvious that for every dollar you make in bonus pay, Denton has made much more in terms of extra advertising revenue. You really earned that dollar. But then, at the end of the quarter, Denton pushes your income back down to its base rate, and spends the excess advertising revenue not on you, any more, but rather on his newest properties - properties which, if and when they start making money, will benefit him but not you. If I were in such a position, I'd think that Denton should fund new blogs out of his profits and not out of my bonus: after all, they're his new blogs, not mine.”

To me this line from Felix Salmon's article is a classic example of the misplaced belief common in the blogosphere that it's somehow a democratic environment in which perceived unfairness will be corrected. The truth is Denton has done what is really the only thing you can do to make money from writing these days — he's assumed the role of the aggregator and the distributor, not the author. He's built brands that attract a growing audience, and created a structure in which he benefits from the “marginal cost of x trending to zero”. The irony is that unlike the publishing moguls of years past, the barriers to his bloggers going off and starting their own equivalent networks are much lower than the capital one would have needed to invest to displace an established publishing property in the 1980s.

And really, good for him. He's certainly producing much more interesting content than many more traditional publishing properties have been doing for decades, and the quality and intelligence of his sites is generally light years above the likes of TechCrunch, VentureBeat, etc.