Ideas to Incentivize and Scale More Blogs
Quiet generosity compounds
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; luckily, I discovered the blogosphere network, which provided the intellectual satiation for my curiosity along with a community of some of the most curious and sharp people I've encountered. It's one of the few places I've felt at home.
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 assets to invest and give to the next generation of talent without anything in return. Most institutions and other aspects of life are very antagonistic and transactional. The blogging community provided one of the first glimpses into a culture that was truly positive-sum.
At key moments in my life, a 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. We are eternally grateful to our friends and benefactors who enabled us to chart a different path in life. These people, some of whom I met because I read their blogs growing up, acted as our omniscient entity, showing us an alternative path in life. They raised our aspirations and made the right connection at the right moment in our lives.
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, more core meetup czars in different cities, etc.
- Proactive funding to get blogs off the ground.
While starting a blog might be free, blogs may want to report on experiments which cost money. Additionally, opportunity cost exists and proactive funding helps alleviate these concerns.
- Retroactive funding
Not everybody will be legible enough to receive proactive funding. Therefore, retroactive funding enables them to start their own blog, prove themselves, and receive retroactive funding with a body of work.
Scaling Existing Blogs: 1 → n
While one of my favorite activities is reading the early blogs of people, one of my saddest activities is seeing a blogger I enjoyed stop posting. Good blogs rarely fail because the ideas dry up; 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 steps to scale existing blogs:
- 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 guarantees that creations for the next n years have 1% 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.
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