Pajamas Media, Rightblogger Meal Ticket, Pulls the Plug

Stephanie

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Mon Feb-02-09 12:30 PM
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Pajamas Media, Rightblogger Meal Ticket, Pulls the Plug

Edited on Mon Feb-02-09 12:54 PM by Stephanie

Edroso: "Surely the large market for amateur rightwing opinion would draw dollars no matter who was doing the ad-buying."

:rofl:

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/archives/2009/02/pajamas_media_r.php

Pajamas Media, Rightblogger Meal Ticket, Pulls the Plug
Posted by Roy Edroso at 12:30 AM, February 2, 2009

Pajamas Media, a consortium of mostly rightbloggers, was founded in 2005. Its "eventual goal," reported National Review at the time, was "to replace the established media sources with a network of what (co-founders Charles Johnson and Roger L. Simon) call 'citizen-journalists.'" They felt good about their chances; after all, said Simon, referring to Johnson, "You're sitting four feet away from the guy who ended Dan Rather's career." (If you don't remember who Dan Rather is, you can read the Wikipedia entry.)

***

Maybe "revenues" isn't the right word, as rumor had it that most of the money was still coming from investors. Nonetheless Pajamas personnel continued to portray themselves as the future, and MSM journalism as a fading relic. One correspondent traced the MSM's decline to Monica Lewinsky, leaving America "convinced they sold their soul to a devil with a blue dress on." Others gallantly offered to replace the MSM in foreign reporting: "PJM reaches millions of people and they sent a video camera to me in Afghanistan."

But as with all things, eventually money talked and bullshit walked. Last week Simon told Pajamas affiliates that "we have decided to wind down the Pajamas Media Blogger and advertising network effective March 31, 2009," and thereafter they would be free to hustle up ads as best they could.

The responses have been instructive and hilarious.

***

For his part, Ace of Spades lamented the loss of a guaranteed income. "One could figure out one's quarterly payment just by eyeballing one's Sitemeter," he said. "BlogAds paid okay, but there are always those patches where no one really wants to buy ads, making income kind of unpredictable."

That raises a question: if affiliates were paid based on traffic -- which is very unlikely these days -- why would it be harder to make steady money via a service like Blogads? Surely the large market for amateur rightwing opinion would draw dollars no matter who was doing the ad-buying. Pajamas' Simon explained in a response to some of the flak he'd been receiving:

Actually that part of our business has been losing money from the beginning, so the people getting their quarterly checks from PJM were getting a form of stipend from us in the hopes that advertisers would start to cotton to blogs and we could possibly make a profit. Didn't happen. No wonder those people are kicking and screaming now that they are off the dole. (What's their beef? I thought most of them were free marketeer libertarians or something.-ed. Go figure.)

For a moment, there was stunned silence across the internet. You mean they weren't making a fortune off bloggers yelling about Obama?

==more at link===