The Haves and Have-Nots of the Blogging Boom

Two
years ago, David Hauslaib was a junior at Syracuse University who was,
as he confesses, “totally obsessed with who Paris Hilton was sleeping
with.” So he did what any college student would do these days: He
blogged about it. Hauslaib began scouring the Web for paparazzi photos
of Hilton and news items about her, then posting them on his Website,
Jossip.com. (Sample headline: PARIS HILTON SPREADS IT IN THE HAMPTONS.)
“My friends got a chuckle out of it, but it didn’t get really big or
anything—maybe a few hundred visitors a day,” he says.

Then
one day Hauslaib took a good look at Gawker, a gossip site owned by the
high-tech publisher Nick Denton. Gawker’s founding writer, Elizabeth
Spiers, had pioneered a distinctive online literary style and earned a
large following in the Manhattan media world. What really got
Hauslaib’s attention, though, was Gawker’s advertising-rate sheet.
According to Denton, the site received about 200,000 “page views” a day
from readers. The site ran roughly two big ads on each page, and Gawker
said that it charged advertisers $6 to $10 for every 1,000 page
views—almost the same as a midsize newspaper. There was also a
smattering of smaller, one-line text ads bringing in a few hundred
bucks daily. Doing a quick bit of math, he figured that the income from
Gawker’s ads could top $4,000 a day. The upshot? Nick Denton’s revenues
from Gawker were probably at least $1 million a year and might well be
cracking $2 million.

Not bad, considering the blog had no
serious expenses other than its writers—first Spiers and now Jessica
Coen and Jesse Oxfeld, all working for journalist wages—and Webhosting
fees of maybe a few thousand bucks a year. “The rest of it,” Hauslaib
points out, “just goes into Nick’s pockets.”

“And I was like, I can do that ,” he says, laughing.

So
in June 2005, Hauslaib packed his bags and moved to a sparsely
furnished sixth-floor walk-up in the East Village, where he parked his
massive Dell laptop on his kitchenette counter, installed a flat-screen
LCD TV to catch breaking celebrity news, and began working on Jossip in
earnest. He’d start each day at dawn, trolling the Web for dirt about
celebrities and media stars. (“You gotta have something posted before
people get to work,” he explains, “because my audience is people who
hate their jobs.”) By the end of the year, Hauslaib’s site was steaming
along nicely. He had almost everything Gawker had: He stalked the same
celebrities, posted with the same speed and frequency, and wrote prose
in the Spiers vernacular.

The only thing he didn’t have was
Gawker’s audience. About 30,000 visitors a day, Jossip’s traffic is a
mere 15 percent of Gawker’s. Hauslaib was generating a “comfortable
five-figure income,” but certainly not millions. He’d hit a glass
ceiling, in a medium where there weren’t supposed to be any limits.

By
all appearances, the blog boom is the most democratized revolution in
media ever. Starting a blog is ridiculously cheap; indeed, blogging
software and hosting can be had for free online. There are also
easy-to-use ad services that, for a small fee, will place
advertisements from major corporations on blogs, then mail the blogger
his profits. Blogging, therefore, should be the purest meritocracy
there is. It doesn’t matter if you’re a nobody from the sticks or a
well-connected Harvard grad. If you launch a witty blog in a sexy
niche, if you’re good at scrounging for news nuggets, and if you’re
dedicated enough to post around the clock—well, there’s nothing
separating you from the big successful bloggers, right? I can do that.

In
theory, sure. But if you talk to many of today’s bloggers, they’ll
complain that the game seems fixed. They’ve targeted one of the more
lucrative niches—gossip or politics or gadgets (or sex, of course)—yet
they cannot reach anywhere close to the size of the existing big blogs.
It’s as if there were an A-list of a few extremely lucky,
well-trafficked blogs—then hordes of people stuck on the B-list or
C-list, also-rans who can’t figure out why their audiences stay so
comparatively puny no matter how hard they work. “It just seems like
it’s a big in-party,” one blogger complained to me. (Indeed, a couple
of pranksters last spring started a joke site called Blogebrity and
posted actual lists of the blogs they figured were A-, B-, and C-level
famous.)

That’s a lot of inequality for a supposedly
democratic medium. Not long ago, Clay Shirky, an instructor at New York
University, became interested in this phenomenon—and argued that there
is a scientific explanation. Shirky specializes in the social dynamics
of the Internet, including “network theory”: a mathematical model of
how information travels inside groups of loosely connected people, such
as users of the Web.

To analyze the disparities in the
blogosphere, Shirky took a sample of 433 blogs. Then he counted an
interesting metric: the number of links that pointed toward each site
(“inbound” links, as they’re called). Why links? Because they are the
most important and visible measure of a site’s popularity. Links are
the chief way that visitors find new blogs in the first place. Bloggers
almost never advertise their sites; they don’t post billboards or run
blinking trailers on top of cabs. No, they rely purely on word of
mouth. Readers find a link to Gawker or Andrew Sullivan on a friend’s
site, and they follow it. A link is, in essence, a vote of confidence
that a fan leaves inscribed in cyberspace: Check this site out! It’s
cool! What’s more, Internet studies have found that inbound links are
an 80 percent–accurate predictor of traffic. The more links point to
you, the more readers you have. (Well, almost. But the exceptions tend
to prove the rule: Fleshbot, for example. The sex blog has 300,000 page
views per day but relatively few inbound links. Not many readers are
willing to proclaim their porn habits with links, understandably.)

When
Shirky compiled his analysis of links, he saw that the smaller
bloggers’ fears were perfectly correct: There is enormous inequity in
the system. A very small number of blogs enjoy hundreds and hundreds of
inbound links—the A-list, as it were. But almost all others have very
few sites pointing to them. When Shirky sorted the 433 blogs from most
linked to least linked and lined them up on a chart, the curve began up
high, with the lucky few. But then it quickly fell into a steep dive,
flattening off into the distance, where the vast majority of ignored
blogs reside. The A-list is teensy, the B-list is bigger, and the
C-list is simply massive. In the blogosphere, the biggest audiences—and
the advertising revenue they bring—go to a small, elite few. Most
bloggers toil in total obscurity.

Economists and network
scientists have a name for Shirky’s curve: a “power-law distribution.”
Power laws are not limited to the Web; in fact, they’re common to many
social systems. If you chart the world’s wealth, it forms a power-law
curve: A tiny number of rich people possess most of the world’s
capital, while almost everyone else has little or none. The employment
of movie actors follows the curve, too, because a small group appears
in dozens of films while the rest are chronically underemployed. The
pattern even emerges in studies of sexual activity in urban areas: A
small minority bed-hop, while the rest of us are mostly monogamous.

The
power law is dominant because of a quirk of human behavior: When we are
asked to decide among a dizzying array of options, we do not act like
dispassionate decision-makers, weighing each option on its own merits.
Movie producers pick stars who have already been employed by other
producers. Investors give money to entrepreneurs who are already loaded
with cash. Popularity breeds popularity.

“It’s not about moral
failings or any sort of psychological thing. People aren’t lazy—they
just base their decisions on what other people are doing,” Shirky says.
“It’s just social physics. It’s like gravity, one of those forces.”

Power
laws are arguably part of the very nature of links. To explain why,
Shirky poses a thought experiment: Imagine that 1,000 people were all
picking their favorite ten blogs and posting lists of those links.
Alice, the first person, would read a few, pick some favorites, and put
up a list of links pointing to them. The next person, Bob, is thus
incrementally more likely to pick Alice’s favorites and include some of
them on his own list. The third person, Carmen, is affected by the
choices of the first two, and so on. This repeats until a feedback loop
emerges. Those few sites lucky enough to acquire the first linkages
grow rapidly off their early success, acquiring more and more visitors
in a cascade of popularity. So even if the content among competitors is
basically equal, there will still be a tiny few that rise up to form an
elite.

First-movers get a crucial leg up in this kind of
power-law system. This is certainly true of the blogosphere. If you
look at the list of the most-linked-to blogs on the top 100 as ranked
by Technorati—a company that scans the blogosphere every day—many of
those at the top were first-movers, the pioneers in their fields. With
19,764 inbound links, the No. 1 site is Boing Boing, a tech blog
devoted to geek news and nerd trivia; it has been online for five
years, making it a grandfather in the field. In the gossip- blog arena,
Gawker is the graybeard, having launched in 2002. With 4,790 sites now
linking to it, Gawker towers above the more-recent entrants such as
PerezHilton.com (with 1,549 links) and Jossip (with 814). In politics,
the highest is Daily Kos, one of the first liberal blogs—with 11,182
links—followed closely by Instapundit, an early right-wing blog, with
6,513. Uncountable teensy political blogs lie in their shadows.

In
scientific terms, this pattern is called “homeostasis”—the tendency of
networked systems to become self-reinforcing. “It’s the same thing you
see in economies—the rich-get-richer problem,” Shirky notes.

To
see just precisely how rich blogging can make you, it’s worth visiting
Peter Rojas, the cheerful, skate-punk-like editor of Engadget—and the
best-compensated blogger in history. When I meet him one December
evening in his bachelor pad on the Lower East Side, he’s sitting at an
Ikea desk bedecked with three flat-panel screens and looking relatively
fresh, considering he’s just come off another eleven-hour blogging jag.
Like most A-list bloggers, he hit his keyboard before dawn and posted
straight through until dinner. “Anyone can start a blog, and anyone can
make it grow,” he says, sipping a glass of water. “But to keep it
there? It’s fucking hard work, man. I’ve never worked so hard in my
life. Eighty-hour weeks since I started.”

For Rojas, the toil
paid off handsomely. Last fall, AOL bought Jason Calacanis’s company
Weblogs, Inc., which includes Engadget, for $25 million. Rojas himself
didn’t disclose the precise amount he got from the deal, but he had a
good deal of equity in the company and says that, technically, he
doesn’t need to work anymore. Nonetheless, he’s still slogging away at
Engadget because he’s still obsessed with cool new technology. His idea
of a good time is hunting down samizdat pictures of the latest Palm
Treo. “I didn’t intend to become a millionaire,” he says, “but I wound
up there anyway.”

Very few bloggers have come anywhere close
to Rojas’s struck-by-lightning success, of course. But putting that
sort of good fortune aside, the blogosphere is slowly developing solid
business models, which take roughly three forms.

The first—and
most common so far—is the accidental tourist: A lone writer who starts
a blog as a mere hobby but then wakes up one day to realize his
audience is now as big as a small city newspaper. The liberal
journalist Joshua Micah Marshall went this route: He started the
Talking Points Memo blog during the November 2000 election recount
“just for fun,” and his audience grew slowly, reaching 8,000 a day in
the first two years. Then, in December 2002, he broke news of racially
charged comments by Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, and his audience
surged to 40,000 daily. The blog was eating so heavily into his paying
gigs that Marshall began soliciting donations from his readers; in
2003, he signed up with Blogads, an advertising broker, and by this
January he was grossing in the low six-figures. Talking Points Memo has
become a small company with three full-time staffers and an office in
Manhattan. His daily traffic is 150,000 page views, and he now charges
advertisers up to $5 per 1,000 views. “When I started it, I had no idea
it would become a source of income,” he says.

A variation on
this theme is when a lone blogger teams up with the mainstream media.
Andrew Sullivan is the first example of an endgame strategy that may
become quite common in the future. In 2000, Sullivan started his blog,
The Daily Dish, as a part-time sideline, funding it via donations and
ads for five years. Then in January, Time magazine agreed to lease his
URL for one year, making it part of its online offerings. Though
Sullivan says “I didn’t get rich,” he figures the deal will earn him
almost half his income this year.

For advertisers, the whole
lure of blogs is that they’re cheaper than regular newspapers and TV.
Plus, blogs offer tightly focused niches, which advertisers love. “You
wanna reach New York, you buy on Gothamist. You want to reach mommies,
you buy on Busy Mom. How does traditional media match that?” asks Brian
Clark, an ad buyer who orchestrated Audi’s blogvertising last year. The
Audi campaign—which ran online for three months, and got 68 million
page views, and cost only $50,000—was cheap compared with the $500,000
for a Yahoo front-page banner that runs for only one day.

According
to Henry Copeland, founder of Blogads, the first big wave of
advertising emerged during the 2004 election season, when political
campaigners and interest groups realized that advertising on political
blogs was more powerful than direct-mail appeals. “It’s really the
audience—younger voters who are motivated and interested,” says Michael
Bassik, a political consultant who ran online ad campaigns for John
Kerry and other Democratic candidates. Perhaps more important, blogs
are buzz-creation machines: If an ad campaign appears on the blogs,
it’ll often become a subject of conversation among the bloggers.
“They’re social connectors,” Bassik says. Yet each blog has a different
sphere of influence. To get a message out widely, he’ll buy on Daily
Kos because it has the largest readership of any liberal blog (though
it’s also the most expensive, at $4,000 a week). If Bassik needs
click-throughs—someone who’ll click on a candidate’s ad, visit his
site, and perhaps make a donation—he might buy Talking Points Memo
instead, which has a smaller audience but a much higher click-through
rate.

Since blogs set their own ad rates, each one offers a
different value proposition, Copeland explains. A gossip blog like
Perez Hilton has a huge readership—220,000 page views daily—but since
the audience is broadly based, the rates are very low, costing $202 to
run an ad for one week. Meanwhile, a smaller blog might have only
10,000 visitors daily—but if it’s a lucrative, tightly focused niche,
the blogger could charge much higher rates per visitor.

How
big and lucrative can an accidentally professional blog grow? The
biggest so far is Boing Boing, a pioneering site run by five former
Wired editors and writers. By posting wittily, and more voluminously
than almost any other blog—up to several times an hour—they built up a
devoted audience of 1.7 million readers. (Boing Boing is also the
most-linked-to blog in the world, according to Technorati’s rankings.)
The site began running ads two and a half years ago, and the expensive
ones can currently command more than $8,000 a week, according to John
Battelle, whose ad co-op, Federated Media, manages the blog’s finances.
Despite those premium rates, the five Boing Boing bloggers still retain
their day jobs, blogging only part time. “I always figured my life was
fueling my blogging, so I didn’t want to be just a blogger,” says Cory
Doctorow, a novelist, copyright activist, and one of the Boing Boing
five. “We could make a living at this. I mean, we’ve got the
circulation of a good-size magazine—better than a good-size magazine.
And our overhead is much smaller.” Or as Shirky puts it, “The Boing
Boing thing is, they have more readers than Wired and yet they have a
part-time staff of five. That’s the new math.”

The second
basic blogging business model is the record-label approach: Crank out
dozens and dozens of sites and hope that one or two will become hits.
The pioneer here is the new-media entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, who
founded Weblogs, Inc., in September 2003 and began rapidly shotgunning
new blogs into obscure niches: Tablet PCs, Microsoft Office,
“telemedicine,” and the like. It is not, many note, a recipe for
quality writing. “What do his bloggers get? Two dollars a post?” jokes
Brian Clark, the advertising buyer. Nonetheless, Calacanis scored an
enormous hit with Engadget, the second most-linked-to site on
Technorati. “AOL basically paid $25 million for Engadget,” more than
one envious blogger carped to me.

The third and final model?
The boutique approach: a publisher who crafts individual blogs the way
Condé Nast crafts magazines—each one carefully aimed at some ineffable,
deluxe readership. This is Nick Denton’s modus operandi. Though he set
up shop three and a half years ago, making his the oldest blog empire
around, he has launched a mere fourteen blogs. They are all, however,
in niches that target high-spending, well-educated readers—such as
gossip, sex, and politics. The aim is to hit the sweet spot: big
readerships, but not hoi polloi. Gawker even claims to turn away
advertisers that are too low-rent; the site’s ad manager boasted to
Mediaweek that it takes no Ford or Chevy ads because “we hate American
cars” and no pharmaceutical ads because “our readers are healthy and
beautiful.”

Denton is famous for spending months hunting for
writers with the snark and wit that his audience likes. (Obligatory
disclosure: Denton sometimes calls to pick my brain, and last year
hired somebody I recommended.) He’s also equally famous for being tight
with a buck: His bloggers work from home, get no equity, and make
salaries that are by all accounts unremarkable, even by the paltry
standards of journalism. (Health insurance starts on March 1.) Indeed,
before Calacanis sold his company for $25 million, Denton was fond of
proclaiming that there is little money to be earned in the blogosphere.
“Blogs are likely to be better for readers than for capitalists,” he
wrote on his personal site in 2004. “While I love the medium, I’ve
always been skeptical about the value of blogs as businesses.”

But
as his critics note, this is precisely what you’d say if you wanted to
scare other people away from competing with you. “When Nick said you
can’t make money at it,” says one of his frenemies, “everyone believed
him.” Denton and partners, veterans of the dot-com boom, sold their
last company for $50 million, so . . . why would he need any more
money? “But that was just his strategy, and it works.” One terrific way
to stay alone on the tall side of the power law is to discourage anyone
else from trying to climb the curve.

Among bloggers, few
things provoke more rancor than the subject of the A-list. Much as in
high school, C-listers quickly suspect the deck is stacked against
them, and the bitterness flows like cheap wine. No one knows this
better than Elizabeth Spiers, the original Gawker girl. She is arguably
the most famous professional blogger, since she invented its dominant
mode: a titillating post delivered with a snarky kicker, casual
profanity, and genuine fan-girl enthusiasm—sonnets made of dirt. Yet no
good deed goes unpunished; the player-hater e-mail she received during
her tenure at the gossip site was astonishing. “I’d get these e-mails
saying, ‘You’re a dirty slut who can’t get laid,’ ” she recalls. “How
can I be dirty slut and not get laid?”

The very subject of the
A-list is so toxic that Denton refused to be interviewed for this story
and told his bloggers to refuse interviews, too. (Calacanis also
refused.) For her part, Spiers argues that Gawker is now so well
entrenched that it is virtually unmovable.

“You’d have be a
total fuckup to ruin that site right now,” she says. “It’s got so many
links, you’re just going to have a positive growth rate.”

If
the star system rankles the C-listers, it is partly because they have
such a weirdly submissive relationship with A-listers. They envy them,
but they need them, too, because one of the quickest ways for an
unknown blog to acquire traffic is to feed scoops to an A-lister, in
the hopes that the editors there will use the tip and include a
thank-you link pointing back to the tipster. Even better is becoming so
well loved that an A-lister puts you on his “blogroll,” a permanent
list of favorite sites—the blog equivalent of Best Friends Forever.
Over at Blogebrity, the gossip blog born out of the original
A-/B-/C-list joke site, the writer Nick Douglas told me he’d often used
another common trick: posting things about an A-lister—Gawker—to try
and catch the editors’ attention.

“Any time I run something on
Gawker, even if it’s a little mean, they’ll link to it and send me some
traffic. They’re watching. All these bloggers are watching each other.”
He laughs. “It’s a tricky balance there, because you’re trying to get a
high-profile link but not be seen as a sellout. I get accused of
sucking up.” (Indeed, Denton just hired Douglas to edit his new
tech-gossip blog, Valleywag.) Less-sophisticated supplicants will
simply e-mail an A-lister, begging to be linked to, a technique that’s
about as successful as wearing a will you be my friend? T-shirt. “I’ll
get these guys who start a blog and e-mail me like every single new
post they put up, hoping I’ll link to it,” says Rojas. “It’s not
polite! I’m like, ‘Dude, if you send me a really cool news item, I’ll
totally link to you. But don’t spam me.’ ”

Yet one can
understand why the tiny blogs are so hungry for approval. A single
mention from an A-lister can provoke “firehoses of traffic”—as John
Battelle describes it—that can help pluck a neophyte blog out of
obscurity. (This has even happened to me. I run a small science
blog—avowedly C-list, a pure vanity project—and the times that Boing
Boing or Gizmodo have linked to me, my traffic has exploded.) When
Gawker linked recently to a posting at Blogebrity, it nearly tripled
the smaller site’s traffic, from 1,200 visitors a day to 3,500. Even a
link from a smaller, B-list blog can help a struggling newcomer. In his
first two years blogging, Trent Vanegas—the 31-year-old creator of the
gossip site Pink Is the New Blog—barely rated 200 visitors a day. Then
in January 2005, a few medium-size New York blogs—including Ultragrrl
and Thighswideshut—gave him a shout-out, and his traffic doubled. The
virtuous cycle began, and today he has 1 million page views a month,
VH1 is calling to use him as a commentator, and he’s fielding job
offers from E! and Bravo.

“It’s crazy,” he says, laughing. “After a point, you’re like, Where are all these people coming from? ”

Regularity
and relentlessness,” says Arianna Huffington. “That’s how you break
through the static of the 5,000-channel universe.”

In May
2005, Huffington, the political columnist and sometime candidate for
California governor, started the Huffington Post, a blog where her
celebrity friends post their rants about politics and culture. By the
end of the year, it was clocking 18 million page views a month and had
become the fifth-most-linked-to blog in the world. Its ad rates are at
the top of its class, about $10 to $30 for every thousand views. With
financing from a slate of investors including Ken Lerer, former
executive vice-president at AOL Time Warner, the Huffington Post
launched with a full-time staff of four and an office in Manhattan—and
the ability to post around the clock.

Huffington also neatly
intuited the importance of linking, putting scores of A-list bloggers
on her blogroll, realizing they would probably return the compliment.
But even more important was the sheer force of the site’s famous
names—not just Huffington but the spectacle of her friends Nora Ephron
and Norman Mailer blogging merrily away on her site. Mainstream media
lavished attention on the site’s every move, giving ever more publicity
to the venture.

Huffington showed that it was still possible
to quickly move up to the top of the charts. “You think the A-list is
the A-list is the A-list,” says David Sifry, the CEO of Technorati.
“But I’m telling you, boy, does it shift—and does it shift fast.”
Cultural winds can drive blogs in and out of favor: When Sifry founded
Technorati in 2002, many of the bloggers on his top-100-most-linked
list were computer geeks, such as journalist Doc Searls and programmer
Dave Winer. But as blogging grew to encompass politics and pop culture,
Searls dropped to No. 96 and Winer to No. 126.

What’s more, a
blog is like a shark: If it stops moving, it dies. Without fresh
postings every day—hell, every few minutes—even the most well-linked
blog will quickly lose its audience. The A-listers cannot rest on their
laurels. Federated Media owner John Battelle recently published a book
on Google, and while on the book tour, he neglected his own
well-trafficked blog (No. 81 on Technorati’s rankings) for several
days. “And suddenly I was getting all these e-mails going, ‘If you
don’t get your shit together, I’m out of here,’ ” he recalls. He stayed
up late that night frantically adding posts. “If you start sucking,” he
says, “it’s through.”

Yet the rapid rise of the Huffington
Post represents a sort of death knell for the traditional blogger. The
Post wasn’t some site thrown up by a smart, bored Williamsburg hipster
who just happened to hit a cultural nerve. It was the product of a
corporation—carefully planned, launched, and promoted. This is now the
model for success: Of Technorati’s top ten blogs, nearly half were
created in the same corporate fashion, part of the twin blog empires of
Jason Calacanis and Nick Denton.

“The good news is that it’s
still possible to create a top-ranked blog,” says Shirky. “The bad news
is, the way to get into the top ten now seems to be public relations.”
Just posting witty entries and hoping for traffic won’t do it. You have
to actively seek out attention from the press. “That’s how they’re
jump-starting the links structure. It’s not organic.” Indeed, when
Huffington announced her venture and her celebrity guests, bloggers
grumbled that it weirdly inverted the whole grassroots appeal of blogs.
Larry David and Danielle Crittenden are hardly what you’d call
outsiders to mass media.

Will professionalization turn
blogging into media-as-usual? Or will the idiosyncratic voice of the
lone blogger prevail? Elizabeth Spiers thinks that both statements are
true. After she left Gawker, she learned about the power of the
first-mover advantage the hard way, by trying to repeat her success.
Last year, she spent three months launching eight media-gossip sites
for Mediabistro, a career-development site for journalists. They
amassed an impressive 1 million page views a month, a healthy amount,
but hardly Gawker-class. Then in January, Spiers jumped back into the
blog pool with a splash, announcing that she was launching her own blog
empire.

When I call her, she is at her desk in her new
company’s offices in Tribeca. She’s being backed by two angel
investors—Carter Burden, head of the Webhosting company Logicworks, and
Justin Smith, president of The Week, a news magazine. Their first blog,
launching in March, will be called Dealbreaker, and devoted to Wall
Street gossip. Her advertisers would be? “For Wall Street? Pretty much
everybody,” she says. “It’s a high-income demographic, pretty
attractive.” The start-up money lets her pay for a full-time blogging
staff, which she’ll need since she wants her writers to actually do
reporting and break news. And this, she argues, is the future of the
professional blogosphere.

“It’ll be more like the mainstream
media, really,” she adds. “Blogging is increasingly becoming a survival
of the fittest—and that all boils down to who has the best content. The
blogs that are going to stand out are the ones who break news and have
credibility.” Plus, it can’t hurt that Wall Street scuttlebutt is one
of the last truly huge unfilled niches in the Manhattan blogosphere.
“This is a business, and we’ll build business infrastructure from the
get-go.” The age of the blog moguls is here. For Pete Rojas, blogging
paid off handsomely. Last fall, AOL bought Weblogs, Inc., which
includes his blog Engadget, for $25 million. “I didn’t intend to become
a millionaire,” says Rojas, “but I wound up there anyway.”

By Clive Thompson