FiveThirtyEight.com’s Nate Silver signs a $700,000 book deal with Penguin. When people ask me if they can make money blogging, the answer is usually a qualified “maybe” — it’s possible, but hard to make a living. But there are real opportunities to turn a blog into real money through other means — like a book deal, or like speeches and appearances. Those won’t work for every journalist, of course — but viewing one’s blog as both an outlet for journalism and a branding tool can lead to good things happening.
(And while, to my knowledge, no figures have been made public, I’m sure Nate made a decent amount from advertising on FiveThirtyEight down the campaign stretch — not to mention whatever fees he may have wrangled for appearing on MSNBC or HDNet every five minutes.)
Joshua Benton | Nov. 17, 2008 | 2:51 p.m.
Tags: book publishing, business model, career, FiveThirtyEight
But is the idea of blog as branding tool hurting the quality of the blogsphere? There is a growing egocentrism that says the only good ideas are my ideas and I’ll only be civil with those who agree with my ideas. Just look at the Jeff Jarvis/Ron Rosenbaum spat. It may be good for individuals, but I don’t think that it’s helping the process of media innovation to promote this type of blogging to the extent that branding is confused with needing to drown out competing voices.
Well, there’s good branding and bad branding. There are hundreds and thousands of writers who have done a terrific job branding themselves online as smart people who write well and have an interesting personality. And I think the best blogs tend to be the ones with the strongest self-identity. That doesn’t mean they have to be jerks.
True, true on the jerks. I also believe, though, that good reads aside, many of the strongest ideas come from collaboration. I don’t see that spirit online as frequently as I would like.