Thursday, December 08, 2005
BOLDING BILL DUE
Who knew that running a blog was so expensive?
As has been openly and extensively discussed elsewhere on the site previously, Margo was paying Hamish and Kerri to edit comments and articles respectively, and Wayne for the Daily Briefing. Together with various other payments for hosting and banking fees and technical costs, she had personally paid bills of around $44,000 from the launch of the independent site in August.
No wonder she went broke. That works out at around $400 per day to edit a site that looked as though it was unedited anyway; at that rate, she’d have burned through more than $140,000 if Webdiary survived for just one year.
UPDATE. Let’s see what Webdiary fans think ...
Simon Ellis: “This is not failure - this is success ... Once the pressure eases and the tears dry you’ll see Webdiary for the roaring success that it was.”
Mark Jeanes: “You didn’t fail. You succeeded.”
Peter Maigret: “You ARE on the right track.”
Tom Sadler: “You certainly can’t call it a failure.”
Okay; let’s try “disaster”. Margo spent $44,000 in 108 days on a blog, for God’s sake. And how did she spend it? Not on commissioning original reporting or sending reporters to cover events or securing interviews with newsworthy folk or any form of online innovation—the site doesn’t even have a search function, or a PayPal button, or advertising—but on dicking around with comments and hiring a “reporter” whose let-me-tell-you-what’s-in-the-papers role apparently left him with no time to actually report.
More on that imbecilic comments policy: because all comments were moderated (heavily, sometimes being re-written) it had the effect of closing down the site when no moderators were on hand to add the crucial bold tags or whatever. The spontaneous, lively possibilities of comments were killed; by treating comments as mini-essays, Margo actually spent money to make her site worse.
And the content reeked. Even lefties rarely linked to it; maybe Margo should have spent some of that cash bribing them. Or she could have sponsored a World Vision kid for 122 years. Still, you can’t call it a failure.
UPDATE II. Brother Hamish explains the magic of bolding.
UPDATE III. Pixy Misa writes: “I run mu.nu, which consists of around 200 blogs, plus a number of web forums and other sites. One month of Webdiary’s budget would run mu.nu for two years.”
UPDATE IV. An earlier item on Margo’s bizarre editing policy in which she claimed to have spent two-thirds of her SMH payments coping “with the comments load” at her old site. Also, this from comments editor Kerri Browne: “Most of the comments editors’ time is spent correcting the formatting of posts. It takes two mouse clicks to delete an abusive post, yet at least eight keystrokes to add the tags to bold the name of the person the poster is addressing.” All up, Margo might be $60,000 out of pocket over this.