14th Aug 2002
Introducing Gizmodo, The First E-Commerce Blog
Congratulations and good luck to blogtrepreneur Nick Denton and tech writer Pete Rojas on their new commercial blog venture, Gizmodo.com, a site dedicated to cool technology stuff. Rojas will update the site daily with links and short commentary about product reviews on other sites, recall notices, new product releases, and so on. Roughly one out of every four posts features a “buy” link where readers can purchase the products on Amazon or elsewhere. Gizmodo, in those cases, earns affiliate network commissions if people make a purchase as a result of the link.
Nick, who’s a good friend, claims for himself the ridiculous title as the blog’s “publisher,” in as much as he did well enough during the boom that he can afford to finance Rojas on salary for a while (hope they’ve got taxes sorted out, as it’s out there in the public domain) in order to satisfy his curiousity about whether commercial blogs like this can be viable.
The blogirati are already debating the hell out of this, with Dave Winer predictably against it and Nick predictably fanning the flames of the discussion. The best comment I read on the subject came from a blogger I’ve never heard of, Jenny Berger, writing on Blogroots, who wrote:
Asking why blogging should be profitable is about as productive as asking why shouldn’t it be profitable. Have we not yet figured out that on the Web, there is no “should,” only “can?”
I totally agree. The market will answer Nick’s question soon enough, and I wish him the best. I’ve been watching the site in beta for a few weeks, and I give it the thumbs up. I expect believe the site will succeed. I certainly hope so, as it would be a great precedent, if it worked. Who among us wouldn’t love to know the secret of getting paid to blog all day.
I’m a bit worried about relying too much on the affiliate model, as its problems are widely known. Basically, you just have to have a lot of traffic to make it work, even if you have high conversion rates (which I think this site will do more so than most). Frankly, I think blogging represents a huge opportunity for affiliate networks themselves (e.g,. LinkShare, Commission Junction, ReferIt) all of whose businesses have stagnated in the last couple of years since the bloom is off that rose. But I doubt they’re hip enough to have heard of blogs yet. The real opportunity is for the likes of Blogger or Userland. Sounds like Winer’s a non-believer. Ev, are you reading?
If you haven’t you read the Tipping Point you must (via my affiliate link here). One of the author’s key theses is that it takes three types of personalities to make phenomena go epidemic: “connectors,” who know lots of people and love putting them together; “mavins,” who know every last detail about their subjects of interest and love sharing information, and “salespeople,” who have a knack for gaining people’s trust and pursuading behaviors. Could you possibly come up with a better definition of the blogger personality? (Interestingly, while the book was a must-read among the interlectual set a couple of years ago, it doesn’t feature a single Internet story among its umteen case studies.)
Obviously, a lot of bloggers are already using affiliate links, myself included as I pointed out above. If you haven’t noticed that I use them when I link to Amazon or Register, fine. If you do, I expect it won’t much impugn my credibility, as I genuinely like the stuff I recommend. I’m not trying to make a living off my links, but if I get a check once a quarter for beer money, it’s worth the extra 30 seconds I spend preparing the affiliate links. If I were Nick, I’d give Tony Pierce a call, as he’s got the best affilate links woven into his site of any blogger I’ve seen.
But it’s a pain in the ass presently to run affiliate links as a blogger. My link in the bottom of my left-hand margin for my beloved Samsung i300 PDA/phone, for example, has been dead for a couple of months since Amazon stopped carrying the product (just as I hit my blogging stride). I’ve spent a couple of hours searching for another e-com site in an affiliate program that carries the product without success. Having to join multiple networks is a real hurdle.
But imagine if the affiliate network were built seamlessly into Blogger Pro (either through a partnership with LinkShare or whoever, or through reinventing the wheel). When you as a blogger write a movie review, you could search for the film on a ticket system like Fandango right through Blogger and get paid for readers who buy tickets. Or when you rave about your new digital camera or whatever, a quick search in Blogger and you can create an affiliate link in under a minute. That, my friends, could be the killer app of the blogosphere.
But as for running a profitable affiliate blog, I don’t know. You would need massive traffic to make it work. I know some affiliate sites can perform quite well, but it’s a lot of work. At least Nick seems prepared to give it a good run for his money, and I applaud that. But I still think that’s got to be only one leg of the stool from a revenue perspective. I hope (and believe) Nick has other ideas in mind.
As a bit of public feedback, I’d say the blog, while already compelling in its single-mindedness, could afford to ratchet up the personality a bit more, which is required to assure the blog a loyal following. Also, it could stand to be a bit more blog-like, if that’s how the site is to position itself. I notice, for example, there are no links to other blogs on the site, which isn’t really in the spirit of the whole blog thang (link to me! link to me!).
BTW, in case your’e wondering, this is not the big blog-related venture Nick has been hinting about for a while now. That goodness, b/c it would be rather lame if it were. This, I think, is more of a hopeful hobby on Nick’s part. He is still going to pull another rabbit out of a hat to guarantee a position on DayPop sometime later this year.
As if I hadn’t already solved the economic problems of this new medium already, here’s another pearl of wisdom I just came up with. Pete, if you can swing me a sample Canon A40 digital camera, I’d be more than happy to write a review you could link to. But here’s the rub: Get Gizmodo on the gravy train for review product samples. Then farm out the product reviews to quality bloggers, whose reviews the site can link to. If the reviewer doesn’t like the product, she can give it back to Gizmodo. If she wants to keep it, Gizmodo will sell it to her for 25% of retail value. Everyone’s happy. The manufacturer gets PR (of the really prestigeous blog variety). The reader gets an honest review. Gizmodo gets a revenue stream. Bloggers get cool shit at massive discounts for doing what they’d do anyway.
But for being so brilliant as to think that up, I want my Canon A40 for free.
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