Blogging 1.0

A couple recent blog posts and my lunch today took me back in time to blogging 1.0, circa 1996/1997.

Jeff Jarvis blogged today that the New York Times Company is the front runner to purchase About.com from Primedia.

And Brad Feld blogged yesterday about Bo Peabody's new book, Lucky or Smart.

Walking home tonite, my thoughts turned to three guys, Scott Kurnit, Bo Peabody, and David Bohnett, who created Blogging 1.0, and one guy, Jason Calacanis, who is working hard on Blogging 2.0.

It was nine years ago.  We had just started Flatiron Partners.  My partner Jerry Colonna and I were on the hunt for the web's killer app.

Jerry had recently left CMGI to join me and start Flatiron.  While at CMGI, he had participated in the seed financing of Geocities. Jerry was a big fan of the free web publishing model that Geocities had created.  And so was I. At that time, we had hired Jason Calacanis to do some due diligence for us and one of the deals we asked him to work on was Geocities. He came back a week later jazzed as hell about the deal. We sensed that we were on to something.

So we went to dinner with David Bohnett, the founder of Geocities, and made him an offer to invest.  It took David a while to get CMGI to warm to the idea of inviting anyone else into the deal.

So while David was selling our deal to CMGI, Jerry and I started looking for a plan B.  The only other game in town in the free web publishing business was Bo Peabody's Tripod. So we met with Bo.  He had a very similar business but his metrics weren't the same as David's. 

And finally David was able to convince CMGI to accept our deal and so we told Bo that we were going in another direction.  Bo found others to back his idea and eventually sold the business to Lycos and made a small fortune.

In early 1997, a couple months after we invested in Geocities, Scott Kurnit walked into our office with a plan to start a business called The Mining Company.  It was Geocities and Tripod with a different twist.  Instead of hosting free web sites, Scott was going to recruit people (now called bloggers) to create web content using a platform similar to what Geocities and Tripod had built.  But Scott's model was a more traditional media model in the sense that he would pick the content creators instead of inviting everyone to create content on his site.

We loved Scott (and still do) but we couldn't get comfortable with the overlap with Geocities and so we passed.  I also hated the name (and still do).  Scott fixed the name, changing it to About.com, and built a great business that he took public and sold to Primedia and made a larger fortune.

Geocities continued to grow like a weed, was in the top 10 sites on the web from the day we invested and we took it public and sold it to Yahoo! and David make an even larger fortune.

That was Blogging 1.0.  We knew back then that the web was a great platform for personal expression.  All three businesses still exist.  Two of them exist inside of web portals and About.com apparently is going to get sold soon, apparently to the New York Times Company.

Blogging 1.0 paved the way for Blogging 2.0.  I see four fundamental improvements that differentiate Blogging 1.0 from Blogging 2.0. 

The first is the notion of the post as the central piece of content.  About.com had some of this in its DNA, but Geocities and Tripod did not. Posts drive freshness, frequency, and syndication and make Blogging 2.0 much more exciting than Bloggin 1.0 was.

The second is related to the first.  Permalinks have changed the game fundamentally.  Linking to content was not really possible until permalinks came along.  Now each piece of content is a persistent object that has a unique identifier.  This is a huge deal and this concept did not exist in Blogging 1.0.

The third is RSS. Blogging 1.0 was a web experience.  Blogging 2.0 is a everywhere experience. Content was a solid in Blogging 1.0 and its a fluid in Blogging 2.0.

The fourth is CPC and contextual ad networks.  In Blogging 1.0, the only way to monetize the business was with banners.  And brand advertisers were not thrilled with paying high CPMs to advertise on "amateur content".  With the arrival of CPC and contextual ad networks, this is no longer the case.  Wherever advertisers can get clicks, they'll place their ads. The result is a huge increase in the potential revenues.

So where does Jason Calcanis fit back into this picture?  He has built the Blogging 2.0 version of About.com.  Along with Nick Denton, Jason has pioneered the creation of a media model around the Blogging 2.0 platform.  And he is doing a great job with it.

I am not going to blog any more than that since Jason told me that our lunch was "off the record".  We laughed about that one.  Now that everyone is a journalist, every conversation has to be "off the record"!

But its safe to say that we saw a lot of parallels to the Blogging 1.0 businesses that were built almost ten years ago and we think that some of those dreams will get realized in a much more meaningful way in Blogging 2.0.

Comments

[simon]

have you ever eaten at MASA fred ?

http://newyorker.com/shouts/content/?050214sh_shouts

seems a wee hostile.

[Toby]

Great post. Interesting to see how much of what is going on now is the same as what was going on back then, with only slight differences that make it actually work.

I think your first point of +Blogging 2.0 brushes on this, but I think one of the keys to success is the ease of publishing data. CSS and easy posting interfaces make it easy to display your thoughts in a semi-professional way. Sure beats animated gifs, and font hodge-podge.

[Nico]

CPC is just one part of the picture. we are moving fast into a model where the conversionrate also plays a bigger role. that's when businesses build upon CPC will get problems.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Fred:
I think you left out the most important difference: The link. It's the link -- the ethic of the link and the tools to track links -- that enable the cream to rise to the top and enable people of like minds to find each other, most important, enable the distributed conversation that is the essence of this world. In the old days of 1.0, people put up pages with no way to be found and we had no way to find the trees among the kudzu. Now the links connect people.

[Bennett]

A concise history not just of blogging, but of the Web! Great post.

Jeff Jarvis' post was also illuminating on the subject of About.com's model. We are both at iMedia, as is an About.com senior executive who told me this morning that among the hundreds of About.com "Guides" are folks who've been doing it since the days of The Mining Company. They are part of the family and need to be reassured about the future every bit as much as the employees.

About.com has long been among the top 20 Web sites. Regardless of whether distributed content would be the right model if TMC/About started today, versus paid writer/editors, they have created and nurtured an enduring and very connected and loyal community of users.

[Jason]

Wow... what can I say.

I'm flattered by being put in the same league as my friends--and knowing/unknowing mentors: Kurnit, Bohnett, and Peabody.

About.com is a mess of a site right now, but when Scott was running it the site had huge value and as people mention it still have great guides with passion. That passion turns into traffic.

As I get older and learn about business--which I did in public the first time around, and I'm now doing in a reality TV show--I keep coming to that word: passion.

The people you mention were all passionate about their company, their teams, their work, and their "users." If I had to use a word to describe my life today it is passion.

The 71 bloggers we have are beyond passionate... each one does something really amazing every couple of weeks. The result? Every day two or three amazing things happen at the company and we all talk about them. The result of that discussion? More Purple Cows... and we all know how that goes. :-)

[Alan]

Don't forget about FreeLoader and eShare -- FreeLoader completely anticipated RSS and the value to advertisers and to publishers of a subscription model and eShare began their business model around driving conversations and posts on some of those very same sites (GeoCities in particular). To me the big difference of Blogging 2.0 is that the web truly is the platform now (to repeat a cliche) -- rather that only being able to participate under the auspices of an media web site -- and essentially only communicate to that community -- the entire Internet is now one large network with various web sites and blogs being nodes on that network - and we can all participate in the same fashion thx to standards etc

[Yali Friedman]

About getting bought by NYT? Exciting. Eager to see what this will do for the way I work.

[sam parker]

Thanks for the post, Fred. A couple thoughts...

The reason the only way to monetize Blogging 1.0 was with banners is because no one stretched their thinking on the medium beyond how it was analogous to a magazine. There were ways, they just weren't considered (or acted upon).

Second, those individuals within a company who have an acute interest in the top and bottom lines are interested in far more than "clicks". Conversions (sales) and quality user/ subscriber acquisition are the key. The challenge is being sure this interest at the top is translated and received well by the media buyers and marketing people who create and implement the actual campaigns.

Also, it's important to remember that many variables come into play in driving quality "clicks". The audience is important (which is developed by the content) but without the attention of the audience, "clicks" (interest) cannot occur. Ideally, the ad message itself must be strong enough to grab the attention of someone who is engaged in something else, then encourage them to click through -- but only if there's a high probability they'll convert to a sale or acquisition (qualifying them).

Then the selling begins (landing pages, acquistion pages, real world sales processes for handling inbound inquiries, etc.).

[stefan]

great post, i like the idea of blogging1.0 and blogging2.0 very much.

but why did you not mentione pierre, who even did a bigger fortune? ebay started at blogging1.0 time - and the most important value pierre created was the idea of the feedback system. ebay´s business relies on trust between buyers and sellers - basically solved by a kind of blogging system, if i may name it that way.

[Brian Horey]

NYT just announced they bought About.com for $410MM cash or 10X revenues and 30X EBITDA. Someone at the Grey Lady must be worried about their print revenue streams!

[Gonzalo]

Hey Fred,

I just loved your post. That's what we like to read read, well, at least I love reading. This pieces of information you can't find them everywhere else, but told by the people who were making them. Awesome, the time you dedicate to this kind of posts has a HUGE impact in many many people. Keep it up!

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[Robert Young]

Fred, you should revisit this (excellent) post... especially in light of WIN's deal with AOL.

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