Does the Pageview Ecosystem Support Deep Thoughts?

MG Siegler asks why bloggers post such repetitive, superficial analyses. Tom Limongello wants to know why there isn’t a “startup blog” rather than mere tech blogs. Nick O’Neill discovers that Forbesgot a ton of traffic for repackaging a far better NYT story.

These posts are all asking the wrong question: if we can recognize quality (or the lack thereof), and we’ve all seen informative opinions versus random pageview-generating blather, then the question is not “Why doesn’t it happen?” but “Where does it happen?” It’s not as if people with something insightful to say will just shut up about it (ask them).

Digital Due Diligence is supposed to be a case study in exactly this problem. We’ve explicitly rejected the model of maximizing pageviews—instead, we’d like to maximize the value of pageviews. Not in the touchy-feely sense that it’s good to have a high-quality audience: in the sense that the whole point of this exercise is to continuously demonstrate an understanding of the online traffic-generating ecosystem, to people who can profitably use such expertise.

(That’s part of why we’ve chosen a fixed schedule. If we published whenever we had news, we’d end up in the business of competing for scoops. We’d rather compete on the next-day analysis than the next-minute details.)

The blog industry scales, but being a blogger sure doesn’t. Look at the Forbes example. 1.1m pageviews is great, but at an average CPM of $5, that’s about $5,500. At one to three posts per day, with a median pageview count of closer to 3,000, this blogger is basically breaking even for Forbes excluding a few big wins. And few companies can afford to source talent at breakeven rates when their upside is in the four-figure range. (And that, of course, ignores the fact that one must amortize the value of the Forbes brand name down to zero over time, as it becomes less synonymous with a sort of William-F.-Buckley-tries-his-hand-at-financial-journalism vibe, and more of this. The Huffington Post and Buzzfeed are working fine as businesses, but their high-salary hires look less like a business decision and more like hood ornaments.

High-scale blogging is just not a great medium for turning expertise into revenue. It’s a fun, fast-twitch sort of profession, but it’s extremely incremental. In the punctuated equilibrium of the tech blogging zeitgeist, bloggers provide the incremental refinements, but the actual insight comes from elsewhere. There’s nothing wrong with that, but there is something wrong with expecting more than the medium can deliver.