Month: February 2011

In the wake of the AOL merger, Nate Silver wonders how much money the Huffington Post makes off its unpaid serfs bloggers:

The Huffington Post receives huge amounts of traffic: about 15.6 million page views per weekday, according to Quantcast. But it also has a huge amount of content accounting for those page views. It publishes roughly 100 original pieces per day — paid and unpaid — in its politics section alone. And politics coverage, according to Arianna Huffington, reflects only about 15 percent of the site’s traffic. How many page views, then, does an individual blog post receive? And roughly what is it worth to The Huffington Post?

His rough calculations:

[T]he average blog post — which we estimate generated a couple thousand page views — was worth about $13 in advertising revenue. The median blog post, with several hundred views, was worth only $3 or $4. Even Mr. Reich’s strongly-performing post was worth only about $170, by our estimates.

I wrote my Sunday Times column on this on Sunday, which is paywalled. Money quote:

As the advertising online market has taken off, the first attempt to really, really exploit it has begun. Here's the philosophy outlined in a memo last year from AOL's chief Tim Armstrong. Editors were to select stories (mostly borrowed from other outlets or generated by unpaid serf-bloggers) based on the following priorities: traffic potential, revenue potential, edit quality and turn-around time. Notice the priorities.

Now, obviously, newspapers have always been commercial and want to sell stories. But what's new about the web is that every page view adds potential revenue and there is no limit to potential pageviews. The temptation to run a website devoted almost entirely to hysterical claims about Obama's betrayals of the left and shirtless pictures of Hugh Jackman striding out of Australian surf becomes rather huge. Addictive even. But huge is the point. HuffPo's business model is sheer size. If you can throw as much content – free, borrowed or merely linked to – in one, sprawling place, you will generate a big enough crowd of eyeballs – 40 million of them a month at last count – to bring bigger and bigger advertisers to sign on.

Ka-ching! For me, the most telling part is that of the $315 million, Arianna and her investors only took $15 million in AOL stock. More an act of cashing out than digging in. But, hey, it's a model and it's working. And no-one is forced to write for free. If you can make a fortune off people's vanity and desire to express themselves, why not?

I'll get to president Obama's fiscal cowardice and downright irresponsibility later today, as it now appears quite apparent he has no intention of doing anything to tackle the country's greatest fiscal crisis in its history. But first off, someone who takes fiscal conservatism seriously, unlike Obama. The speech Mitch Daniels gave at CPAC reminded me why the Dish is such a fan. Check out his riff on budget cuts:

Lost to history is the fact that, in my OMB assignment, I was the first loud critic of Congressional earmarks.  I was also the first to get absolutely nowhere in reducing them: first to rail and first to fail.  They are a pernicious practice and should be stopped.  But, in the cause of national solvency, they are a trifle.   Talking much more about them, or “waste, fraud, and abuse,” trivializes what needs to be done, and misleads our fellow citizens to believe that easy answers are available to us.  In this room, we all know how hard the answers are, how much change is required.

And that means nothing, not even the first and most important mission of government, our national defense, can get a free pass. 

Later on, he delivered this dose of reality:

We will need people who never tune in to Rush or Glenn or Laura or Sean.  Who surf past C-SPAN to get to SportsCenter.  Who, if they’d ever heard of CPAC, would assume it was a cruise ship accessory.

And when did you last hear a Republican talk like this:

We must display a heart for every American, and a special passion for those still on the first rung of life’s ladder.  Upward mobility from the bottom is the crux of the American promise, and the stagnation of the middle class is in fact becoming a problem, on any fair reading of the facts.  Our main task is not to see that people of great wealth add to it, but that those without much money have a greater chance to earn some.

Rich Lowry commented that it was impressive "for Daniels not to strike one pandering note." That isn't quite true. He did say, "our opponents are better at nastiness than we will ever be.  It comes naturally.  Power to them is everything, so there’s nothing they won’t say to get it." Still, a very imppressive speech on the whole – from easily the most plausible and fiscally honest Republican in the field.

Is that all the Sunni dictator in Bahrain has left?

(Hat tip: Mackey.)

An interesting anecdote from Dave Weigel:

The very moment that Ron Paul won the straw poll, I was handed a press release from Young Americans for Freedom:

"NATION'S OLDEST CONSERVATIVE/LIBERTARIAN ACTIVIST GROUP EXPELS RON PAUL FROM ADVISORY BOARD." 

YAF's senior national director Aaron Marks was quoted saying Paul was "clearly off his meds," and that YAF was "more aligned with Obama" than Paul on national security.

I walked outside to celebrating members of Paul's Young Americans for Liberty. They interrupted hugs and high-fives to have a laugh at this. "Why be this inflammatory?" laughed Jeff Frazee, executive director of YAL. "It's a publicity stunt, but it's nice to see them say they agree with Obama."

It's interesting to ponder how different and newly dynamic the fault lines are in today's conservative movement.

Gone are the days when the Cold War held the right together despite differences of opinion on domestic policy. This year, opposition to Obama's domestic agenda is what unifies the right – and it remains to be seen whether it'll prove sufficient to keep the conservative movement together despite its virulent disagreements on foreign policy. The reason you haven't heard much about Iraq or Egypt or Afghanistan is because a reprise of Bush-Cheney would go down like a Ricky Gervais joke at the Golden Globes.

When I heard Dick Cheney heckled as a "war criminal" at CPAC, I knew conservatism was making a comeback. I know Ron and Rand Paul are out there on many issues. But they are critical dissenting voices in a movement that needs more dissent on foreign policy and more candor on entitlement spending. My straw poll vote would have gone to Gary Johnson, but the Pauls are close behind.

(Photo: Ron Paul addressing CPAC by Chip Somodevilla/Getty.)

“They have cut off the electricity to the street lamps on the Enghelab St. from Imam Hossein Sq. to Azadi Sq. and they are beating people in darkness. People have started fires to combat the tear gas,” – an eye-witness to the BBC in Tehran.

The video is from Mehdi Saharkiz’s Twitter feed today.

(The quote is the one timed 17.15. As always, help in translating Farsi is always appreciated.)

Thoreau applauds the Internet for seizing on the inane O'Reilly rant. It really was a classic. And, sadly, a case of how the public defense of Christianity or religious faith is now left to these blowhards and boobs.

Tyler Cowen isn't impressed with the new Atlas Shrugged trailer:

It has some Art Deco architecture (good), but signs of the modern world intrude at the wrong moments.  It should not have high-speed rail (will this confuse conservatives?  Did those governors end up cutting Medicaid and coughing up the money?) and it should not postulate unrealistic speeds for freight trains. … Hank Rearden's line about only wanting to earn money comes across as either a parody of Gordon Gecko or as something worthy of Gecko's parody.