Is this blog for sale?
I’m still thinking about the purchase of the blog Bankaholic.com by Bankrate.com, reported in Blog Business Summit, 10/2/08, for $12.4 million.
I mentioned in Building a Blog to Flip It that director of business acceleration center VT KnowledgeWorks and So you want to launch a business... blogger Jim Flowers said this at Concept Camp:
“Everyone has a number.”
In the lively discussion via comments on Building a Blog to Flip It, one commenter, Robert Giles, my father, concurred: “It’s almost impossible to be flipless.”
In a conversation on selling blogs with my parents at dinner the other night--from whom I have a "friends and family loan"--my mother said, "Oh, you have a number all right!"
When I first conceived of Handshake 2.0, I asked for guidance from Pat Matthews, a founder of Mailtrust. I printed out his e-mail answer and have it taped to my office door. He wrote, "Build a large, loyal readership."
Why would anyone buy someone else’s blog for $12.4?
Because it has a large, loyal readership.
Because building a large, loyal readership takes the creation of consistently excellent content consistently over time.
Why would anyone, as Jeremy Hart commented, “write for an audience, encouraging engagement, if the end goal is simply to sell it off”?
Why does anyone sell a treasured heirloom, the family farm, a high-tech entrepreneurial enterprise, or a blog?
Because it’s almost impossible to be flipless.
A thoughtful person does not know what will become of a painting, a sculpture, a farm, a daughter, or a business. They know that they are sustainable but history and archaeology testify that they cannot be sustained. We can discuss "sustainability" and its current meaningless -http://fwie.fw.vt.edu/rhgiles/a_rural/chapter%208.html - but we must either design systems that are (1) temporary, (2) flexible and prepared to change and be re-molded, re-structured or re-cast, or (3) we must give up on thoughts of permanence and "everlasting." Hoping to "be around for a long time" may be the best we can do. Though it may hurt, flipping is not failing.
Posted by: Survivalist | October 21, 2008 at 07:53 AM