More than 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 keep a weblog, a diary of thoughts, argument, musings or whatever on their own website, with links to other sites and oodles of commentary besides. In the past, 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 so on.
It was a gruelling 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 want to a readership that has no physical boundaries.
My modest venture, imaginatively called www.andrewsullivan.com, is about two years old. I’ve written tens of thousands of words, made hundreds of new web friends and get about 400 e-mails a day. I’ve never enjoyed myself so much as a journalist, had as much impact with my writing or so much sheer fun as a commentator.
But it’s also true — here’s the catch — that this wonderful experiment has yet to make me any significant financial return. Despite what the New Statesman recently called the “astonishing influence” of my site, it pays next to nothing. Donations from readers have largely paid off my start-up debts and defray the ever-growing server costs. Unlike almost every other new media entity, then, andrewsullivan.com is a success. But it still requires my working two or three hours a day essentially for free.
Other online sites have lost a fortune or are barely keeping afloat. Slate.com is doing relatively well, but it is backed by Microsoft’s huge resources and the invaluable portal of MSN’s home page. Even so, it’s no money-maker. Salon.com is a great forum but is now a penny stock and has had to ask readers to subscribe to keep it afloat. Other sites — such as online versions of the political weeklies — are essentially dependent on old media to keep them afloat.
One of the best of the free blogs, Arts & Letters Daily, was a wonderfully eclectic digest of literary, political and philosophical debate until it went under less than a week ago. Whatever else it is, working for free isn’t much of a business model; I pay my mortgage by writing for the old media. And yet, for all its economic dysfunction, the new medium has never been as powerful as it is today. I wonder if any technological innovation has ever combined such extraordinary new power with such dramatically poor financial rewards.
Last month, The New York Times passed a media milestone. The number of its website visitors for the first time eclipsed its regular circulation on dead trees. On average, 1.28m people logged on to nytimes.com each day in September. Its weekday circulation, in comparison, is 1.2m a day.
My more modest traffic numbers tell a similar story. I’m one of a handful of big blogs and get more than 20,000 daily readers, who often come back more than once a day for updates. Last week my site was visited 237,000 times; on current trends, October could well break the million monthly visit mark for the first time.
Compare that with the reach of The New Republic, the esteemed political weekly I edited for five years. It delivers about 90,000 copies a week; a single article might get read by perhaps 200,000 people. So 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.
Web readers, to add to the paradox, are also valuable — or should be. In a recent survey, The New York Times found that the typical reader of its paper version is 50 years old while the typical Times online reader is 35. A survey of my site found that about half were under 40 — an astonishingly young readership for political commentary. These readers should be lucrative for advertisers, 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 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 it’s 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 cost of running them so tiny compared with producing millions of newspapers that you can’t talk people into paying for them.
Besides, the minute you do, you lose part of what makes these sites work and makes them superior to older media. A critical part of the web is the users’ ability to link to other sites and articles freely and often. If half these sites are closed to non-subscribers, they shut themselves off from the broader web conversation. But being part of that broader conversation is what gives blogs unique, fascinating appeal. They can make arguments, fact-check them and rebut them in a seamless and endless conversation.
The most obvious scenario for future profitability may be the way in which the economics of writing on the net will become enmeshed in new and interesting ways with the old media. Take a classic example — Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee and not so long ago a respected but somewhat unknown academic. Since launching his weblog, instapundit.com, he has leapt to the top of the internet pile. He has a column on another site and contributes to papers such as The Wall Street Journal.
I now produce a weekly version of my blog, which I have sold to a couple of dead-tree newspapers for 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 buy a new book and discuss it online with the author. The site gets a small commission when we sell such a book on Amazon.com, and the commissions can add up. Last week Christopher Hitchens’s new book, Why Orwell Matters, was our choice and its Amazon ranking went in a few hours from 1,074 to number three.
Every little counts. Pretty soon I hope to be selling T-shirts and mugs. And when I write another book, my site will doubtless be a great way to promote it.
So, 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. Once upon a time AOL was going to save Time Warner, remember? These days it’s Time Warner keeping AOL above the water line.
But this, too, is part of the internet adventure. It has whiplashed our expectations more than once and will doubtless do so again. We still don’t know where it’s headed but we’re intent on enjoying the ride. So what if it isn’t a money-maker? 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.
