Absolutely fascinating (and somewhat humorous) information about how Arianna's Huffington as well as other websites with political content may be on the ropes. HuffPo may well be gone by late 2010/ early 2011. TFA article also names six other online publications which may hit the brick wall at about the same time.
I recall back in ancient history in 2005 when Ms. Huffinton launched her blog the same year as mine I said then in complete confidence that her $7 million initial seed money I could do the same thing for about one percent of what she received.
Fast forward four years, with five solid regular readers later and I doubt I could do it for $70 million.
From TFA:
The evidence that can be gleaned is that Arianna and her gang of 100 acolytes that "staff" the Po have a burn rate of maybe $1M/month, giving the Po about a 24 month shelf life (from last December, giving them about a year to live ... unless they get a new cash infusion).
The Po was funded, as a business, by a venture capitalist. Not an advocacy site like Center for American Progress. There is zero evidence that the Po is generating, or capable of ever generating anything like $12M a year. (Just a guess, but ... where are the ads???)
Nor is there much evidence that the Po has anything like the political clout of populist bootstrap webspaces like the much less expensive, feisty, DailyKos or the really, really smart Personal Democracy Forum. The Po -- except for the rare columns by Esther Dyson and a few others -- not only is journalistically shoddy -- parajournalism, really -- but is consistently guilty of the most unforgivable crime on the Web.
| The crime of being boring. More at the link. |
| The crime of not having a business plan ... |
| I think the business plan is to write cool stuff, burn through money, and get the next sugar daddy to pony up. So far it's worked exactly as planned... |
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