No drooling in anticipation, bloggers. Keep your job and look elsewhere for economic freedom. Over at Slate, Daniel Gross makes a very convincing argument that even as small as it was, the blog bubble has popped.Intangibles, oh yeah. Freedom of speech, sure. Self-righteousness, absolutely. Money, well, he says if you haven't clicked, you blew it already. Blinked? Too damned bad.
"(A)s businesses, blogs may have peaked," he writes in the Moneybox section. Among his warning signs are:
- Magazine Cover Indicator — Time and other big-city and national maggies have featured blogging and blog giants like Google. Traditionally, this has been a prognosis of trend death.
- Smart Guys Cashing Out —— Smart market timers like Bob Pittman made money on blogs and sold before a crash. When they sell, crashes follow.
- Excited Dinosaurs —— Big media buys into something new after it is stale. That's another sure indicator of a down slope.
- Gullible Latecomers —— He cites Pajamas Media, the right-wing collaborative that raised venture capital to come in, too late, according to Gross.
The whole piece is worth a read and has lots of links so that you can evaluate his material. Read it and giggle or weep or both.
Enjoy your new media (we do), but don't max out any credit cards in anticipation of your new-media fortune.
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