making blogs pay

How to make blogs payConrad Quilty-Harper

Me

• Weblogs, Inc. (Engadget.com, Joystiq.com, TUAW.com)

Me

• Mahalo.com Inc (MahaloDaily.com)

Me

• Catch21 Productions

Me

• City University Investigative Journalism MA

• TheMediaBlog.co.uk

Case study

Engadget

• “Gadget blog”

• Founded 2004. Key players Peter Rojas, Jason Calacanis, Brian Alvey

• Peter:15 blog posts a day

• At start: effectively one man coverage of CES

• Low pay, no office. BUT: had stock.

Engadget

• 18 months after launch, Weblogs, Inc. and Engadget.com sold to AOL for ~$25 million

Engadget today

• 50 blog posts/weekday

• More than 50,000 blog posts total

• 100(s?) of millions of page views/month

• Official blog partner of CES

• Adweek Readers’ Choice for Blog of the Decade

Engadget today

Engadget @ CES

• 2005, Peter Rojas

• 2006, Peter and a small team including the CEO, Jason Calacanis

20072008

2009 2010

Engadget @ CES

Me @ Engadget

• June 2005 - December 2007

• ~1,750 blog posts, ~250,000 words

• Blogs, features, interviews, liveblogging, photos, video, “whatever works”

• 2x CES, US iPhone launch, UK iPhone press conference

Engadget

• Owns a niche: best blog covering consumer technology and gadgets

Engadget

• Why does it own this niche?

• Does more technology coverage, better and faster than anyone else

Engadget

• Search engine friendly

• Descriptive titles, body of posts have lots of keywords, effective backlinking, tagging

• Bespoke CMS- Blogsmith, great scale. Grew with the site. TMZ.

• Respecting the community (Reader meet-ups, AskEngadget, The Engadget Show, product giveaways, strong ethical policy).

Engadget

• Always profitable

• $500,000 venture capital from Mark Cuban

• Other writers started on nothing, or $2 a post. I started on $6/post, left on $15.

What works?

• Scale

• Niche content

• Quantity + Quality (in that order)

• SEO

• Grow with your revenue

What works?

• +30% traffic/month, or YOU DIE.

• Niche needs to be big so you can scale.

• Need to cover that niche broadly and better than anyone else.

• Make sure your broad, quality content is highly searchable.

• Make sure your costs are always lower than your revenue.

Money/Advertising

• Adsense

• Banner ads

• Promotions

• Sponsorship of gift guides, events, conference coverage

• See: http://advertising.gawker.com/

Engadget

• “It's not that we're doing this all for you. No, sir or madam -- we're doing this because we are you. “ -Joseph Flately, Engadget.com

• BUT: strong editorial ethics.

Ethics

• Buy your own gear (apart from AOL issue laptops/monitors)

• Give away or return any products given by companies

• Pay for all travel/accommodation

• NYTimes ethics

Engadget

• Liveblogging conferences key to Engadget’s growth and success

Engadget

Summary

• Early mover

• Better than competitors

• Loooooooow cost, high profit

• Aol: incompetence, not interference

• Open content (free iPhone app, full content RSS)

• Other: 20 hour days @CES (fun for me, but worth noting)

What’s the trick?

• Low cost

Engadget

• Similar technique/model works for:

• Weblogs, Inc.

• Gawker Network

• TechCrunch

• BoingBoing, Mashable (Federated Media)