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The more I blog the more it reminds me of high school with its cliques who talk only to each other and don’t even make eye contact with the rest of us passing in the hallways. Nothing symbolizes this better than the 2007 “Great Purge,” which, although it happened three years ago, is still rippling through the world of liberal blogs, leaving lots of now-dead blogs in its wake.
Like high school big shots huddling in the hallway, “The Great Purge” began with a decision by several of the biggest of the big shots to ignore the rest of us. You remember that from high school don’t you? Those kids with the cheerleader skirts and letter jackets would decide to deliberately shun someone. They wouldn’t talk to you, look at you, acknowledge your presence, other than with a purposeful whisper, a snide comment, and perhaps something overtly aggressive like cutting in front of you in the lunch line..
So since this is high school, a little Economics 101 might be in order, or as Deep Throat said in All the President’s Men, “follow the money.” Atrios, who started the purge, at the time earned $5,000 a month in ad revenue according to a profile in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
In blogdom–which is my name for the big-time lords and ladies of what they seem to think is a medieval kingdom– there are several ways of calculating a blog’s “reach,” and hence its advertising potential. All of us know about Technorati which provides a blogdom “Nielsen rating” by ranking blogs according to the number of links.
In his “shunning” post the orange one was being his usual disingenuous self when he said, “Despite popular misconceptions, a blogroll link isn’t a major source of traffic. It won’t make or break a site.” It may or may not be a source of traffic (more on that in a minute), BUT blogrolls can increase a Technorati rank, if you play them right. Remember, it’s not how many links you have, but how many link to you.
Every blogger knows the drill: you send this letter, trying not to, as Atrios condescendingly puts it, sound like a “blog whore,” saying you have posted a link to their site and will they do the same for you. Most of the time the Big Dogs will blow you off and you get nothing in return, but some people keep listing them anyway.
Let’s turn the tables and talk about equity. Suppose YOUR site just happens to have a good post, will it ever see the light of day on the orange site? Of course not, that is unless you sign on to be a “diarist.” That’s why reciprocity is important. If you list the the orange site or link to one of its posts, even though he won’t list or link to yours, he makes money. And you? You are as much a sucker as someone playing the slots in a casino.
In what was once the blogoshere, there was a certain etiquette, that, although unwritten, revolved around reciprocity. I list your blog, you list mine. In blogdom, that is gone. With little money to go around–and some bloggers, feeling that money even corrupted the process–what made the blogosphere function was an evolving cooperative community. Like all communities it had its quirks and certainly its share of eccentric characters but it also had folks like the Wampum site that once published the now-defunct Koufax awards and sites like Crooks and Liars that saw as part of their mission to encourage new voices and to recognize those of us out on the fringe.
On top of the Technorati rankings, which are a bit primitive in terms of the stats a $5,000 a month advertiser would want, there are the metrics that many of us keep. As you know, these track a variety of data: how many people are viewing your site, for how long, and whether they are newcomers or regular visitors. They also tell where people are coming FROM. Here we are back to the blogrolls and post links. Like high school kids, if they only talk to each other then no one else matters. So they link to each other constantly in what systems people call a reinforcing loop.
Now here is where the economics gets positively Darwinian. The orange one has somehow convinced a significant number of people to post “diaries” on his site. There is nothing wrong with blog communities who have lots of diaries. For those who post this seems like a good deal. There is no charge for this and since the site is highly-ranked it is sort of like writing for The New York Times–or is it?
The more diaries you have on a site, the chances are most of those diaries will be read only by a few people, friends, the few who stumble across them, and others. BUT every one of those diaries read reads gets counted as a read for the SITE. So let’s assume a site has 500 diaries and each has ten readers–all of a sudden THAT SITE has 5,000 readers.
You take that many diaries and then you let “survival if the fittest” take over. In fact from what some people have been saying, posting on the orange site is not unlike being a contestant on Survivor, complete with all the intrigue, backstabbing and sucking up. Those that rise to the top enjoy a huge readership, but their position is as precarious as a wage slave. Every B gangster film has the line, “I can make you and I can break you.”
This is not true of diary sites left that have principled editors who deliberately make it a point to promote the work of those who might not be “front pagers.” They also provide plenty of opportunities in the form of open threads, daily rants, and other “community activities” to allow everyone who is part of the site to have an opinion.
But the Big Dogs don’t much value the voices of us “little people.” The front page wannabes generate numbers which in turn generate revenue, but do those writers see any of that revenue? No, even though the National Writer’s Union condemns the practice of making money off writers who don’t get paid for generating those revenues. You would think people would catch on, but like the wannabes that follow the Big Dogs around in high school, these people don’t seem to care. By posting on one of these sites in some way that makes them a Big Dog too.
The final piece of this may be the most interesting. Given that the orange blog is a business, the purge represented what public relations people call repositioning. The orange blog repositioned itself as the central place for local blogs supporting political candidates and for the media reporting on them. It was a brilliant business move that now has resulted in television appearances where the orange one purportedly speaks for the “netroots. “ Three years ago I predicted that the purge would make the orange site a voice in the Democratic Party. That was one of the better predictions I made, but any idiot could have made it.
A post from that year gives a clue (sorry no link without reciprocity): “Those are sites focused on the races that will determine whether we lose control of Congress, or whether we expand our numbers to Lieberman-proof majorities.” In shorthand, the orange one had gone from Dean to Emanuel. Gone was the 50 state strategy. Gone were the progressive ideas. Instead he would publicize sites for candidates that can win.
By now, you’ve had enough Econ 101 you can see the light. Supporting sites for marginal candidates or candidates who may take tough stands on issues or raise uncomfortable questions will not generate traffic and if they don’t generate traffic they won’t generate revenue. The Big Dogs in high school behaved like that. They only let into the group people they could use. This also explains another reason for the purge–get rid of anyone who whose rhetoric might raise awkward questions.
Even back in 2007 a few were starting to get it. Posting about “the community” Eastern Okie writes:
The point of this diary is to remind all of you to please not think of this place as a community. it is not, your individual voice matters here as much as it does in Washington, and you are expendable if you dare to challenge the status quo. [This site] is a business, there is nothing wrong with that standing alone, but like all businesses its single function is to make money. there is no community policing underway, that’s a ruse, but there are police. the purpose of the police isn’t to keep trolls away, but to keep the blog mainstream enough to generate more revenue.
As readers of my site and my book know, I happen to believe that the only way the Democrats can win is to emphasize values, especially the value of the level playing field. For the Big Dogs and others, values do not matter, only money does. But money without values is hollow and doomed to failure. Somewhere Karl Rove must be smiling. Somewhere Ronald Reagan may be having a good laugh. Somewhere Jerry Falwell is preaching one hell of a sermon. Somewhere the Rush Limbaugh clan is holding a barbecue. Blogdom is in danger of becoming that which once opposed.
The $64 question that continues to haunt blogdom is how much ideological control will the Big Dogs exercise? The Pogo quote could go in here, but that’s too easy. There is a better one. In the last speech given before he died on the guillotine, Robespierre, who more than any single person was responsible for the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, stated, “What tyrant is my protector? To what faction do I belong? Yourselves!” The irony of that quote captures the Blogdom.
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