Attracting the smartest audience
Category: Navel Gazing...
Posted Tuesday, July 08, 2003 at 02:26 PM [GMT-6]

John Gruber has an excellent post over at Daring Fireball dealing with his strategy for making his blog a paying proposition. Whether you want to emulate his business model or not, he makes some good points about the advantages (and challenges) of being an "independent publisher," why Google's AdSense program is superior to other approaches, and how good website design is like a good hairpiece. He also has a thoughtful perspective on why blogs are blowing their "mainstream" counterparts out of the water:

What is most remarkable is that the web is the only medium where independent personal publishers are delivering superior-quality products than the giant media conglomerates. Motion pictures? Forget about it. Even a low-budget film costs millions of dollars. A shoestring budget film might have a good story and engaging characters, but it isn’t going to look good. It’s an extremely expensive medium. Broadcast? Low-budget independents can only dream of producing broadcast media.

Print? Independents can fight to a draw here, in terms of quality, but it’s difficult to scale on a low budget. Paper and printing, and the distribution thereof, is much more expensive than internet bandwidth.

The web is where independents shine. Independent web sites tend to look better and are better produced. Their URLs are even more readable. This isn’t bluster about the future, this is a description of today. With a text editor and an Apache web server, you’re on equal footing with any web site in the world. Even if you can’t design worth a lick, the default templates for most major weblog packages are decidedly more readable and better designed than typical corporate media web sites. For short-form opinion and analysis, the web cannot be beaten as a writing and reading medium. The immediacy, linkability, lack of word count restraints (this works both ways, short and long) and direct connection between writer and reader puts the independent producer at a decided advantage over media corporations.

Go read the whole thing. And forget that he's basically a Mac-guy at heart; some of the nicest smartest people you know are, as well.