Creative Weblogging

Filed in archive Venture Capital on January 26, 2004

I co-founded and invested in a pretty interesting project recently.



What is it?


Creative Weblogging is simply a network of well marketed weblogs. The company aims to
create a number of vertical niche weblogs.



What do we want to do?


We want to provide authors an opportunity to use the economies of scale in a
media network. You might compare the business model with a franchised media
house. The franchisor builds a brand and provides all operations benefiting
from size like marketing, sales, IT infrastructure and finance. The franchisee develops the product and does the real customer service. In our case an author has expert
knowledge in a certain area, which he wishes to publicize. If he also wants
to monetize his knowledge we help him by giving him a platform to succeed. Of
course the intellectual property stays with the author; we only advise him in fine-tuning his
writing work and market the traffic of his site.



Why do we think it will work?


Simply we believe - blogging is a
revolution and we have just seen the smaller part of the iceberg. Webloggers
are real entrepreneurs. They create sites, do detailed research and
invest a lot until they find their payback when community visitors arrive
enhancing the writers wisdom and creating an even more interesting site.



We aim to help authors to monetize her/ his knowledge and to provide helpful content under a
common roof for an interested community. We are convinced that such
vertical communities can be build up perfectly using weblogs. In this regard
we have similarities with weblogsinc or
about.com. However both companies have a pretty different
approaches to the same idea - providing micro filters for users. While about.com is very horizontal, weblogsinc is more vertical and focuses so far on
several tech topics.



Indeed it will not be easy to generate sufficient revenues from weblogs. As
most bloggers will know its tricky and a risky business, no doubt. Therefore
we call it a venture :-). We want to
provide our content free as long as possible, so we explored some
interesting ways to use the full revenue potential of a vertical site. Obviously AdSense revenues are limited in their
potential, but it's a good tool to start with. We
are in the process to apply more of them just surf by ...



What are the benefits for bloggers?


We see our model as a special service for niche bloggers. We help people to
get their message out and earn some decent amounts from it. Insofar you
might also compare us with redpaper.com,
a site providing independent content for small fees. However for making it work we
rely heavily on our authors and support from the blogosphere. If you like the idea
and if you have great content and writing skills, we would like to
talk to you! We have short-listed several
topics, but we also appreciate your own ideas and suggestions.



The outlook


Hard to say - we've got a long-term motivation building this. There is a rocky road ahead of us -- let's see where it leads to...



Links


We already got some initial reactions from the blogosphere:

• 
  
  


• http://www.wortfeld.de/side/2004/01/index.html#000578


• http://www.duesenschrieb.de/weblog/archives/00000749.htm


• http://www.metamorphine.de/weblog/comments.php?id=P354_0_1_0


• http://www.buzzmachine.com/archives/2004_01.html#006005


• http://www.moosmilbe.de/


• http://www.polarluft.de/index_ablage_19jan04.html#10385922


• http://cyberwriter.twoday.net/


• http://bloghaus.net/weblog_00697.php


• http://uckan.info/


• http://weblog.plasticthinking.org/


• http://waterk.antville.org/


• http://uckan.info/posts/projekte/div/anonyme_noergler.txt