Emily Bell, editor of Guardian Unlimited, issues a peeved though eloquent defense of the business model of blogging.
The man who doesn’t believe that blogging is a revolution or is financially sustainable is one of many sceptics and countercultural poseurs who like to preach certainty where the only certainty is that there is none. The problem the sceptics battle with is that there is no viable business model, still, for much of what happens on the internet. Or so they think – and this particularly applies to traditional media businesses.
But then one could more powerfully argue that finding a business model for any medium, old or new, at the present time is an exercise in mining unsustainability. There are plenty of businesses that make good money out of old media, and a growing number that make very good money out of the web.
The crucial problems start when old media businesses expect to be able to apply exactly the same kind of business model to the web as they have to their old businesses….
