Some lawyer’s blogs become very, very profitable
Don’t let it go to your heads as a means to escape the practice of law, but some blogs are very profitable.
One of which is TechCrunch, founded by former Wilson Sonsini lawyer and tech entrepreneur, Michael Arrington. Sam Zuckerman features the TechCrunch blog (now media company) in this morning’s San Francisco Chronicle.
In 2005, when Silicon Valley entrepreneur Michael Arrington started TechCrunch, his popular blog on Internet startups, he saw it mainly as a chance to indulge his obsession with young technology companies. But it turned out that Arrington had latched onto something big. TechCrunch became the go-to site for the scoop on new Web companies……Today, TechCrunch has a full-time staff of eight. This year, it hired a CEO. In August, 1.25 million people visited TechCrunch or its affiliated blogs at least once, according to comScore Inc. It brings in $240,000 per month in advertising, according to Arrington, and pulls in additional revenue from conferences and parties. Most important of all, TechCrunch is in the black.
What’s even more interesting, per Zuckerman, is that blogs, something still dismissed by major publishers as ranting diaries, are morphing into a major publishing force.
From the blogosphere’s anarchistic roots, a professional cadre is emerging that is creating an industry whose top-performing businesses now earn serious money. The industry is expanding at warp speed. Blog-based media could just be poised to elbow aside traditional print and broadcast outlets to become one of the dominant sources of news, information and opinion, many observers believe.
‘As traditional media continue to contract, this stuff is going to expand,’ said Steve King, senior fellow with the Society for New Communications Research, a Palo Alto think tank. ‘The business models have caught up and you’re starting to see little blog publishing companies that frankly are becoming not so little.’
The blogging world has tremendous strengths – original voices, provocative opinions, imagination and intimate knowledge of a variety of subjects.
Admittedly, blogs such as TechCrunch and GigaOm, also highlighted in the Chronicle are the exception. The vast, vast majority of blogs do not create any significant revenue. Talking this week with a blogger at b5media, a global blog network, he believed that one could crack the top 100 in blog revenue by earning fairly low sums.
Key though is Zuckerman’s point that blogs have great strengths, law blogs included. “..[O]riginal voices, provocative opinions, imagination and intimate knowledge of a variety of subjects,” make it possible for law blogs to supplant traditional print legal media, which is going to continue to contract.