Três perguntas a Duncan Riley do The Blog Herald

Duncan Riley vendeu recentemente o The Blog Herald por 72 mil dólares (mais de 59 mil euros).

Enviei três questões a Riley, que, para alguma surpresa minha, respondeu rapidamente.

Porquê só três questões? Em primeiro lugar, porque Darren Rowse já publicou uma entrevista que cobre quase todos os tópicos. Em segundo, porque Riley deve estar afogado em e-mails semelhantes. Achei que fazendo só três perguntas, tinha mais hipóteses de obter uma resposta.

Riley é um dos fundadores da rede de blogs b5media. Nasceu em 1975, na Austrália. Em 2003 fundou o The Blog Herald (uma fonte de informação sobre a blogosfera) e, em 2005, a rede Weblog Empire, que mais tarde se juntou à b5media, criada em parceria com bloggers como Darren Rowse e Jeremy Wright (que tratou da venda do The Blog Herald).

Posto isto, aqui segue a mini-entrevista, em inglês:

What did you sell exactly? Just the brand? What happens to the contributors?
The blog, all its content, the brand, the coding behind it, the whole kit and caboodle. I’ve only got a handful of contributors, and they only contribute irregularly (it [is] not a multi-person blog in a strict sense).

Do you believe individual blog sales will become common practice?
Yes, and to some extent it already is at the lower end of the market, you quite often see blogs pop up for sale for a couple of hundred USD through to a couple of thousand dollars on forums like Sitepoint. I think over time that the value given to blogs will also increase as well, indeed the new owner of The Blog Herald could end up with a very nice earn on his hands in 12-18 months time :-)

Is RSS reading threatening blog’s revenue?
Yes, and no. Yes if you are providing full feeds and are reliant on advertising on your site only. I’ve only published a part feed for The Blog Herald for the better part of 12 months because I actually saw traffic dropping because of the feed, and the introduction of a part feed immediately resulted in an increase in traffic to the site. If I’m providing free content and reading I don’t think its unfair to ask people to visit the site if they want the full story. The win because they get the content for free, and I win because they’ll view ads. RSS advertising at this stage doesn’t really pay but over time this could improve.