“The barrier to entry in internet media is low — [but] the barrier to success is high,” says Gawker Media’s Nick Denton to N.Y. Times columnist David Carr.
“[Denton] thinks all of the bluster around blogs, fueled in part by AOL’s purchase of weblogs, has brought stupid money off the sidelines,” Carr writes. “He has felt the touch of clammy hands from venture capitalists more times than he would care to count. ‘There is no doubt that there is a bubble right now,’ he says.
“So why not cash out? ‘Because it would be too hard to start over,’ he answers. ‘Sites need to be well-managed and well-designed and even then it is harder and harder to launch one. The world does not need more blogs,” adding that if you count all the pages on MySpace, “there is approximately one reader for every blog out there.”
Note to readers: MCN’s David Poland linked to Carr’s article either last night or earlier this morning, so that means he kind of owns it, and if anyone else links to this article or riffs on it, they’re a kind of poacher, or so Poland believes. They’re taking a dump on land that he’s found and staked out and filed a claim on. HE recognizes that MCN linked to the Carr piece first, and profusely apologizes for offending Poland’s acute sense of territoriality.