Blogging: In Praise of Small

Bloggers may long for the page views of a Huffington Post or DailyKos, but there's much to be said for speaking to a small, dedicated community

by Sarah Lacy

Anyone who thinks the blogosphere isn't big hasn't been paying attention.

Blogging has moved far beyond a hobbyist phenomenon and proved itself a legitimate news force and shaper of opinion. Homeowners are swarming finance blogs for information on the financial crisis. During Microsoft's (MSFT) battle for Yahoo! (YHOO), blogs drove the news coverage, stock prices, and even analyst reports. Voters are learning as much about the Presidential race from DailyKos, Drudge Report, and Talking Points Memo as they are from cable TV. Bloggers Arianna Huffington and Michael Arrington are among Time's 100 Most Influential People, and their respective mini media empires are now worth $100 million or more, according to industry estimates.

But increasingly there's a sense that the blogosphere lost a lot on the way to getting big. Jason Calacanis, one of the first to make serious money off blogging (when he sold his Weblogs to AOL for a reported $30 million), recently announced his "retirement." "Blogging is simply too big, too impersonal, and lacks the intimacy that drew me to it," he wrote in a press release-sounding post. A lot of people dismissed the announcement as a publicity stunt.

Yet the drumbeat has only gotten louder. Last year, Robert Scoble, who made his name blogging, lamented that tech blogs had let readers down; in their obsession with page views, blogs were forced to play the PR game and serve as outlets for embargoes and product releases. Then there was the widely read New York Times article chronicling blogger burnout.

Trolls and Spammers

I, too, am asking some of these same questions. After seeing my own blog readership swell in a short time to about 40,000 per month, I have misgivings about seeing sarahlacy.com grow much more. Bigger audiences mean trolls and spammers and a general breakdown in community and the high-level conversation I find so rewarding.

In fact, over the four mediums I'm participating in this year—a book, a blog, an online column, and a video show on Yahoo—my personal enjoyment was in direct inverse relation to the size of the audience each caters to. It's not that I don't love the rush of doing tech celeb interviews that wind up on Yahoo's front page of 500 million viewers. But after more than a decade in journalism, it's a sweet luxury to write just for the people who seek out my blog.

Which led me to a startling realization: Small really is beautiful, and we need to find a way to value it. I decided then that I may never put ads on my blog, and certainly wouldn't let Twittads sell ads on my Twitter account. Until I could find an advertising vehicle that valued my audience as much as I do, blogging would just be a loss leader for me—a hub for everything else I was doing and a way to solidify myself as a thought leader. After all, isn't a decade of industry experience and contacts worth more than pennies a click? BusinessWeek, Yahoo, or any organization that pays me to speak certainly thinks so. Why should I value myself any less?

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