Blogging for Dollars
It's not just a hobby — some small sites are making big money. Here's how to turn your passion into an online empire. — (Business 2.0) — Michael Arrington is a partying kind of guy. While showing off his home in Atherton, Calif., he boasts about how he crammed 500 people …
Context & Ripple Effects
Michael Arrington founded TechCrunch earlier in 2006, and within months he had become a go-to figure for Silicon Valley startups hoping a write-up would put them on the map. Business 2.0's profile turns that arc into a case study in "micro media": a small site run by one person generating substantial revenue, presented as a repeatable path from hobby to online empire.
The framing matters because it comes from a mainstream business magazine, not the blogosphere itself — and the immediate pushback, with Valleywag mocking the piece as "Biz 2 pretends Mike Arrington is fun," shows the personal-publishing gold rush already has skeptics questioning whether the money and the influence are being oversold.
First-order effects
- Startups gain an explicit incentive structure around one blogger: with Arrington positioned as a kingmaker, a TechCrunch feature functions as a de facto launch event, concentrating PR effort and attention through a single independent site.
- Arrington's reported revenue makes ad-supported solo publishing a demonstrable business, changing how entrepreneurs, and mainstream outlets like Business 2.0, categorize blogging — from hobby to enterprise.
Second-order effects
- Other independent writers have a template to copy — niche audience, advertising revenue, low overhead — which means crowding in exactly the tech-blog space Arrington opened, and pressure on the novelty premium early entrants enjoyed.
- Advertisers chasing the startup and early-adopter audience acquire a cheaper buy beneath the established trade press, forcing incumbent tech publishers to compete on rates against sites with near-zero cost structures.
Third-order effects
- If the model holds, gatekeeping power over which startups get attention consolidates into individual publishers who are also commercially interested parties, blurring the line between journalist and promoter — a structural tension the Valleywag jab hints at and one regulators and readers alike have no settled framework for.
- The broader shift is toward media businesses built on personal brands rather than institutions: if one-person sites can out-earn traditional outlets on their own turf, the economics of tech publishing tilt toward many small operators instead of a few large ones.
The trend: Solo web publishers are converting niche audiences into profitable media businesses, turning individual bloggers into power brokers in Silicon Valley's attention economy during the Web 2.0 boom.