\u201cBlogs today benefit from what might be termed uneconomies of scale,\u201d the Business 2.0 article says. \u201cThey are so cheap to create and operate that a lone blogger or a small team can, with the ever-expanding reach of the Internet, amass vast audiences and generate levels of profit on a per-employee basis that traditional media companies can only fantasize about.\u201d<\/p>\n
Take the Fark.com example. The site generates 40 million page views a month with a staff of one full-time person and two contractors. Its only real operating costs are bandwidth charges. It produces almost no original content and has no capital costs. Members contribute their own content, so no editors are needed. The site almost runs itself. Yet this could approach $10 million in revenue before long. <\/p>\n
Craigslist.org is another example. This is the fifth most popular site on the Internet, with global reach and an estimated four billion <\/i>page views a month. It is absolutely killing the newspaper classified ad business. I read one estimate that Craigslist had cost There are plenty of other examples. BoingBoing.net is maintained by five contributors, all of whom work on it part-time. Google Blogoscoped<\/a>, which is the best independent source of information about Google, is run by one person in his spare time. It\u2019s averaging four million page views a month. Gizmodo<\/a> grew to become one of the top five blogs on the Internet with only a single contributor. Digg.com<\/a>, which is barely two years old, is already among the top 25 sites on the Web. Its traffic outstrips all the largest media sites. It has a staff of 15. <\/p>\n None of these sites is making piles of money yet, but I think that\u2019s only a matter of time. Companies like John Battelle\u2019s Federated Media<\/a> and Nick Denton\u2019s Gawker Media<\/a> are figuring out the business side. And it\u2019s not like these blogs have to make a lot of money to keep going. Adrants<\/a> generates over $100,000 a year in advertising and that\u2019s plenty to keep Steve Hall plugging away at his one-man operation. He\u2019s getting paid to do something he\u2019s passionate about. <\/p>\n How do these sites generate so much traffic at such low cost? They outsource everything.<\/p>\n Having talked about the inefficiencies of the existing newspaper model, let\u2019s look at the economics of what\u2019s emerging in the Web 2.0 world. A recent story in Business 2.0 magazine revealed the income of some popular bloggers. Read this article … Continue reading ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.paulgillin.com\/uploaded_images\/digg_traffic-734581.jpg\")
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