Blog Media - Depth is the New Black?

Reading about Jason Calacanis' new Tech Media pre-startup, Launch in the Grauniad I saw this:

"When I started with Peter Rojas blogging was a new format that was faster but still had quality and insight," he said. "Now it's even faster but it has lost that quality and insight. You have a bunch of people writing short stuff with no research and knowledge base. They have no credibility."

What the market needs, he says, is depth, knowledge and thoroughness. Launch will take the form of an email publication which might seem against the grain, but is something Calacanis is convinced suits a more exclusive, more engaged audience.

"If you get people to commit to an email relationship, it's the deepest most intimate relationship you can have online. Much deeper than Facebook and certainly more intimate than a blog," he says.

"I want high-quality insider information, a celebration of entrepreneurship and taking risk. I want it serious and insightful rather than salacious and link-baity."

Wry smile from Broadstuff Towers here - like every other blog writer, I guess we know the truth - worthy, in depth pieces are fine but if you really want to generate traffic, then short, topical ephemera are what really do it. And yes, people tell us that its quality, not quantity that drives influence, but as far as today's metrics, and thus perceived valuations work, quantity has a quality all of its own.

Add to that the economics. I have a rule of thumb that says roughly every time you double 500 words, you triple the time taken to write it.

So big, qualitative pieces cost more to produce and are less valuable in the blog market. A real recipe for success then......

My view, from about a year into writing this, is that blog media works best as a sketch media - watercolour vs oils etc - at least with the current reading tools, I can see that e-Readers and Tablets may change this over time.

Discuss