Public Self-Pedagogy

So if I say this post is an exercise in public self-pedagogy (don’t try this in red states) then I needn’t be too embarrassed to riff off Rafat Ali’s recent item about Weblogs, Inc. being featured at Google’s analyst day. “Described as the largest publisher of professional blogs . . . Weblogs is averaging $600 a day in AdSense revenue and made $45,000 in the first four months.”

I traced the thread back to the personal site of Weblogs’ co-guru Jason Calacanis but that only raised the question, who is Jason?

“For those who do not remember or know of Jason: nobody was a bigger mover or shaker in the New York City Internet doings (once called Silicon Alley) than Jason,’’ Alan Meckler, chief executive of Jupitermedia wrote not long ago. Meckler alludes to Jason’s crash during the dot debacle but says he “is back big time with 73 blogs under (the Weblogs) umbrella and offices in Santa Monica, California and New York City. Daily traffic and advertising is strong.”

Wow, quite a deal. Wonder what Jason is like?

“Jason Calacanis . . . is the single most competitive person I’ve ever met,” Jeff Jarvis wrote recently on Buzzmachine. I came across Jeff’s comment via a post by New York writer Felix Salmon, who includes a lovely link in which Jason describes his life-long study of the “brutal martial art” of Tae Kwan Do.

Okay, so if I ever meet Jason, be polite. But what does Jason say about new media business models?

“In my mind blogs have killed the newsletter business,” Jason comments in response to a writeup about the sale of one of his previous businesses, adding, “blog + database + research reports = big business, blog plus nothing = a hobby.”

In another posting Jason says, “Bloggers who reach critical mass—say 250,000 pages a month—can easily monetize that at a $2-5 CPM (or $500 to $2,500 a month) . . . If you get less then 250,000 pages guess what? You’ve either got more work to do or you need to look at your blog like the hobby or labor of love it is.”

Getting two bucks for every thousand eyeballs that see your page seems like a hard way to make a living, but maybe that's the point.

That left one more curiosity to explore. There was a comment posted on the weblog entry in which Jason mentioned the Google presentation about his site earning $600 a day from AdSense. “That's not a great CPM there Jason, looks to be under a buck,” commented Jon Gales. For those who, like me, ask, who is Jon? He’s the guy who told Business 2.0 about a year ago that he made $55,000 putting out the MobileTracker ezine. By the way, it’s not too late to wish Jon a happy birthday. He turned 20 on Sunday.

Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy "Cause if you ain't Mass Media, you're Mini Media."