Tech blogs go from hobbies to businesses
ATHERTON, Calif. — "Om (Malik) and I love scotch," Michael Arrington says. "But we never drink anymore." — The two friends no longer have the time or energy, in part because they're too busy competing with each other.
Context & Ripple Effects
The arc here runs through Business 2.0's August 2006 profile of Arrington's site generating substantial revenue: within a year, the one-blogger experiment has become a going concern with staff, an events arm (the TechCrunch20 symposium co-hosted with Jason Calacanis), and a direct rival in Om Malik's operation. USA Today's hook — the two friends no longer have time to drink scotch together because they now compete — captures how quickly the hobbyist era ended.
That a national general-interest paper is writing about blog economics at all signals the mainstreaming moment, and the story's same-day pickup by CrunchGear shows the subject covering itself.
First-order effects
- Michael Arrington and Om Malik are running competing editorial operations at full intensity, with the personal friendship and shared downtime as the visible casualty.
- TechCrunch's expansion beyond a single blog — staff writers plus a conference business with Calacanis — turns the site from a publication into a small media company.
Second-order effects
- Rival tech blogs must match the new bundle — daily news, personality-driven voice, and live events — pushing hiring and operating costs up across the category.
- Mainstream coverage legitimizes blogs as advertising vehicles, pulling brand budgets toward independent sites and away from the print tech press that used to own that spend.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, solo blogger sites consolidate into venture-backed micro-media companies, collapsing the distinction between 'blogger' and 'publisher' that defined Web 2.0-era tech coverage.
The trend: Independent tech blogging is professionalizing from hobby into revenue-generating media business, with conferences, staffing, and head-to-head competition marking the shift.