Reporter's Notebook: Professional bloggers Jason Kottke and Heather Armstrong took the stage at SXSW to discuss what happens when you start making a living from your hobby.The story of blogging has largely been written. It was a niche activity for early adopters. It became a personal journaling trend among the confessional set. It was ignored, and then reviled, and finally adopted by politicians and journalists. It became a business for those bright enough to see its potential, and it made quite a few entrepreneurs rich. The headline in a recent issue of New York magazine encapsulates the story arc quite nicely:
Blogs to Riches.
So we're past the proof of concept phase and well into making money, and the question now isn't whether there's a business in blogging, but how best to run that business. How, oh how the SXSW attendees wonder, do I make money off me?[1]
So its appropriate that the keynote at SXSW is with Jason Kottke and Heather Armstrong, two high-profile pro bloggers[2] who have profited by taking different paths to blog independence.
Kottke went for a subscription model. He asked his readers to pony up some cash to keep him blogging full-time for a year; Armstrong displayed advertisements.
But beyond debating the business merits of those strategies—are display ads distasteful, does advertising change your content—the larger issue at play is how the business of blogging is changing, and how that change affects readers' and bloggers' expectations. After all, if you're making money from my patronage, doesn't that give me some say in your content? Isn't this all about community, anyway? And isn't the customer always right?
Well, yes and no. Of the two bloggers on stage at the keynote, Armstrong certainly had a better grasp on the fundamentals of business. For a confessional blogger, she has a remarkable grasp of boundaries. She referred repeatedly to the line between personal and professional. Her business model reflects that division.
"I don't consider what I'm doing a journal, I consider it a daily column," she said. "When I first introduced Google ads there was a huge uprising … how dare you, the e-mails said. But I didn't want people to look at my money as their possession."
What's more, Armstrong is a consummate editor and writer. She's concerned with voice and with her brand. She'd be at home working for, say, New York magazine.
Kottke, on the other hand, has a more tenuous grasp of his responsibilities as a business owner. At first blush, he seems to be a practical guy. He's reticent to join in the indiscriminate boosterism so prevalent among the blogging set. His unwillingness to promote a sense of community around kottke.org is refreshing for its lack of self-aggrandizement.
But at the same time you have to wonder—and many people have—can blog editorship be anything but self-aggrandizement? Isn't it a bit much to expect you can create a community portal, ask for money to support that community, and then shirk the responsibilities of running it?
Kottke's not unaware of this tension. "It became way more like a job job," he said, referring to when he started accepting micropayments and running his blog full-time. "I felt I had to do certain things. It couldn't just be whatever the hell I wanted to do with it."
That said, Kottke did take a few vacations during his year-long experiment, causing Armstrong, who had contributed a few dollars to Kottke's site, to say jokingly, "that bastard took my money and went to Asia with it."
But beyond their witty repartee and insight into two disparate styles of blogging, Kottke and Armstrong revealed that despite its recent success, the business of blogging is still a fledgling industry.
Bloggers, whether they recognize it or not, have a new responsibility to their readers. It's not the Wild West of online publishing any longer. It's time to get down to business.
Publish.com editor Stephen Bryant is in Austin, Texas, for the SXSW conference. To read his partial transcript of the keynote, see the Intermedia Blog.
[1] Kottke's and Armstrong's answers to the audience's questions were sometimes reminiscent of a pro athlete explaining his prowess, or a writer trying to explain her craft. To the extent that they can explain, they refer to their own idiosyncrasies, their own personalities, their personal inspiration—unique characteristics not transferable to their questioners. And in the breathless lauding from the audience, you get the sense that behind every question is that thinly-veiled supplication of every aspirant to talent and subsequent popularity: How can I be more like you?
[2] Like in mainstream media, the most popular personalities are the most attractive.
