Ideas to Incentivize and Scale More Blogs
Scaling new blogs and alleviating blog decay
In my last post, I outlined possible explanations for the decline of the blogosphere and the market forces that compete to prevent another golden era of blogging.
While I think that the current equilibrium of the diffusion of bloggers creating a set of active practitioners is a better allocation of human capital, I recognize that this is hypocritical as I am a direct beneficiary of the broader blogosphere. I did not enjoy university and was not on a path toward social and intellectual fulfillment. At the right moment of my life, I discovered the broader blogosphere network, which enabled me to engage with ideas in a way that school never clicked for me at school. Most importantly, it provided me with a network of earnest peers and mentors that provided the substrate for confidence and courage, and growing my ambition at a critical point in my life.
Much of this can be attributed to the fact that the blogging community is made up of an incredibly small number of extremely generous and earnest individuals. Capital and time are viewed as sharable resources to invest and bestow upon the next generation. While most institutions and other aspects of life are typically very antagonistic and transactional, the blogging community provided one of the first glimpses into a culture that can make a legitimate claim to be earnest and positive-sum.
The handful of people provided mentorship and capital that definitively changed the course of my career. Many of my friends and other bloggers have had similar experiences. All of us are eternally grateful to our friends and benefactors who enabled us to chart a different path in life beyond the default life trajectory. These people, some of whom I met because I read their blogs growing up, acted as our omniscient entity. They showed us firsthand what it takes to be great at something, raised our aspirations, and made the right connection at the right moment in our lives. More blogs would enable more people to have similar experiences.
In this post, I provide multiple tested and untested mechanisms to incentivize new blogs and help existing blogs scale.
Incentivizing New Blogs: 0 → 1
The barrier to entry for bloggers is effectively zero. Infrastructure is free via platforms such as Substack. Most of the time, bloggers are stuck in the valley of believing they have nothing interesting to say or don't think the opportunity cost is worth it.
The following are steps to incentivize the creation of new blogs:
- A richer culture of encouragement around starting new blogs to provide an easier on-ramp.
More new blogger Slacks, core meetup czars in different cities, etc.
- Proactive funding to get blogs off the ground.
While starting a blog might be free, opportunity cost exists and proactive funding helps alleviate these concerns. More importantly, capital provides a subtle, in-group signal that their work is meaningful and worthwhile to be pursued.
- Retroactive funding to provide the incentive that tangible blogs will be rewarded.
Not every blog will be legible enough to receive proactive funding. Retroactive funding enables someone to start their own blog, prove themself, and receive retroactive funding after accruing a rich body of work.
Scaling Existing Blogs: 1 → n
While one of my favorite activities is reading the early blogs of people before they became successful, one of the saddest activities is seeing a blogger I enjoyed stop posting. Good blogs don't fail because the blogger runs out of ideas; they fail because the blogger is isolated, under-resourced, or determines that the opportunity cost of writing a blog is too high. Practically, most bloggers find themselves with demonstrated traction while being too small to justify a serious career out of blogging.
The following are ideas to help scale existing blogs:
- Better tooling
The best bloggers write to say stuff worth knowing, not just for the sake of writing. They have countless great ideas but lack the time and resources to craft the idea into a legible blog post. Furthermore, many are extremely neurotic and only publish blog posts when it is perfect.
LLMs and other general writing tools decrease the time from idea to post, therefore decreasing opportunity cost. Existing blogs with a corpus of existing posts and other internal documents can better leverage LLMs to assist in each stage in the writing process as needed. Most of the workflows that exist today are primarily coding and general purpose-oriented, not writing oriented based on personal training.
- Grant matching
For every dollar a writer receives in reader funding during a given period, a sponsoring organization matches it up to a cap.
- PIPE
A writer with existing income (Substack, ads, sponsorships) can sell a percentage of the next two years of earnings for upfront capital. This is analogous to a PIPE round for individuals rather than companies, which is useful for funding projects with upfront capital requirements (e.g. research projects, travel, etc.)
- Implicit rights of the blogger's future endeavors.
For a specific set of bloggers, the real asset is the associated network and deal flow of the blogger. The blogger can guarantee that creations for the next n years have x% reserved for early supporters.
- Invest in bloggers via lump-sum capital.
Bloggers receive capital into an escrow, which can be pulled out after achieving certain milestones. In the success case, the blogger is able to generate an income stream that outpaces the amount withdrawn, so the capital can be returned back to their owners. In the failure case, backers lose their initial investment.
- Add the ability to buy future gated content at a discount.