Solo blogging or writing for big media, the job is the same: Be unique

If you follow people on Journalism Twitter, you may have seen some chatter recently about blogging being dead. I’ve ignored it, because “blogging is dead” is one of those things people have been saying since around 1973. Evidently this round of it happened in the wake of Andrew Sullivan’s announcement that he’s retiring from his paywalled blog.

Mathew Ingram of GigaOm has a piece arguing that blogging is alive and well. He cites a post by Ben Thompson, who runs the one man blog Stratechery, headlined Blogging’s bright future.

Ingram writes that online content success exists at two poles, one of which can be the classic one-person blog:

In a sense, the blogging world—or even the world of online publishing as a whole—has bifurcated to create what I call a barbell effect: sites or even publications like newspapers that are huge and broad and have powerful brands will likely succeed, because they can make advertising work. And those that are small and targeted (either by topic or by geography) will likely also be fine. Everything in the middle, however, is in for a world of pain.

You might not find this interesting if you’re not planning to start your own content company, but I think this analysis works on the individual level too.

Thompson writes that “an advertising business model demands huge amounts of inventory served to a large number of readers targeted with a massive amount of data.” And here’s Ingram with the flip side of that: “The core of Thompson’s argument is that the more niche and targeted your content is, the better off you are likely to be with a subscription model.”

That is, the way to get people to pay for your writing is to make it unique, specialized, targeted. If you’re running your own paywalled blog, the paying customers are readers. If you’re working in the larger media arena, the paying customers are editors. But editors are just people buying what you’re trying to sell. They’re asking the same question potential paying readers ask: Are you offering something that’s unique, that I can’t get anywhere else?