arghyle

Just like everyone else I saw the “Scoble Sells Out” post over at TechCrunch. As someone who started their internet career with a hobbyist site that “turned pro” it’s a topic that really resonated with me.

First off, adding advertisements to your blog does not mean you are selling out. Blogs eat up a lot of time and they can cost money to run, so having a few ads on a personal blog is no big deal. Why not monetize your traffic? If you can do this without angering your users, then you are set.

If your blog grows to get the sort or traffic that Scobleizer.com gets, then he is throwing away thousands of dollars a month by not putting up an ad or two- nothing major, even just a few 125×125 boxes could bring in a lot. If anyone is worried about conflicts of interest with that, I’d refer them to thousands of blogs, web sites, and other publications that run advertisements. Yes, on a personal blog there is no editorial separation but if you trust someone enough to read their blog regularly, you probably respect their opinion enough to know an advertisement is not going to make them pull any punches. It will probably make feel more pressure to call things as they see them in fact.

The problem I see with Scoble’s upcoming addition of 1) advertisements 2) a redesign by Fast Company and 3) other people blogging on his site is that now some lines are being blurred.

First of all, this is his personal blog, not his Fast Company page, but are those going to be Fast Company’s ads? He didn’t say anything about selling the blog, but his new job takes advantage of Scobleizer as if it was part of the package when he was hired. Are Fast Company writers going to be posting there? This is taking his personal blog and turning it into something very different, seemingly a Fast Company property. Fine- that’s Scoble’s decision- but no one has come out and said that, so no one knows what to think. Or people just assume the worst- i.e. Scoble sold out.

One thing that really interested me with all this is the redesign. One of my favorite Scoble posts was back in March 2006 (I’m not sure why I remember stuff like this) when he talked about the advantages of having an ugly web site. I guess the post hit a close to home with me, but what about Scoble’s “ugly” and “anti-marketing” design? That’s all out the window now that Fast Company is in charge?

If I was Scoble I would be worried about the long term life of the blog. He was with Podtech about 18 months. Say he states at Fast Company that long, what then? Did all those years of work just go down the drain? Also, I would be concerned about why I was hired in the first place. Maybe this is just me being neurotic or lacking confidence, but I would be worried that I got my job just so they could leverage my site. From what I can tell Fast Company’s web site does not get a whole lot of traffic–they are big, but not huge. The addition of Scobleizer.com’s pageviews could be a big growth for them, maybe even as big as posting Scoble’s videos on their own site.

I’m really interested to see how the redesign turns out and what happens when/if someone besides Scoble posts on the site. It seems to me that he could have done the redesign by himself, hired a few writers, and start to run ads on the blog without Fast Company. Rather then let them borrow (rent? leverage?) Scobleizer.com, he could put a few of those Podtech paychecks to work and turn the blog into your own business. I don’t blame him for not doing this- it would be stressful and the chance of failure would be higher- but given the success of some other site that have made the move, we know it can be done.

As a side note- I can’t wait to see if Fast Company puts meta refreshes on Scoble’s site. They have them on Fastcompany.com and it’s something I find to be really annoying. This i not something people do on personal blogs, so I see it as a bit of a litmus test.

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