Not at all. See here, including comments. (Earlier here.)

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Abandonment Date March 18, 1999

WTF? Without advertisers locked and loaded into rates that are some margin higher than the price paid for the content?

Sounds like a futures operation run by intermediaries who’ve yet to identify any buyers for all the product they’ve purchased. Or maybe just BlogAds, run by dyslexics who managed to reverse all the P and the L items. Dotcom-era insanity rides again.

The gender angle’s crucial. While Politics Junkie Dad expatiates and slings artful putdowns about weighty matters on CrookedPajamasKosFreeperRedBlueState, Responsible Mom is rapidly and efficiently (in the precious few minutes she has to herself each day) surfing for sites with reliable info and advice on questions about trivial matters like children’s immunizations, which drugs can be taken during the first trimester, where to find car seats that are safe, which SUVs get a 5-star safety rating etc.

Whereas Dad carries the torch of ideological warfare, clicks on few if any ads (Ourside T-shirts! Coffee mugs! After dinner mints imprinted with your favorite slogan!) and spends still less money at the sites he visits, Mom actually buys stuff based on what she learned about all those tedious matters of hearth and home. Lots of stuff, and lots of money.

The only political website I’ve seen that has significant economic value is Kos, which functions more like a product recommender site funnelling money from its audience to Kos’s political clients ie those who’ve been given the Kos Seal of Approval. Never mind that Kos’s clients have yet to win an election—IIRC he’s a perfect 0 for 9 in ‘04—the little b*stard is a brilliant businessman and brand marketer. Give the joker his due.
As to the rest, as anyone who’s worked on the business side of any political journal will tell you, the demographics for political fare are, to an advertiser, a pig’s breakfast: ages, incomes, location are all over the map, and the audience isn’t in a mood to buy anything anyway. This doesn’t cut it for a micromarket, which in the online world is probably anything under 1 million unique visitors per month.

Thanks for the info. I guess I’m just a natural cheapskate.

One thing did strike me from Dennis’s comment that bloggers have already been paid in advance. Some in this thread have wondered why, say, Dan Drezner doesn’t bail. If he’s already cashed the cheque, he may not have the option. He may be contractually bound to supply a certain number of blog posts to the new entity, or a number of blog posts which in aggregate attract a certain number of page views (or . . .).

In addition, Dan in his first post announcing he was to be part of PM said his blog address would redirect to PM at some point. It wouldn’t surprise me that that’s also part of his contractual obligation, if he has, in fact, accepted consideration.

Obviously we don’t (can’t, unless someone violates an NDA) know the terms under which participants can recover their blog addresses. But it may well (sorry for all the subjunctives) not be a simple matter for someone to extricate themselves from Simon’s web.

whether you’re remembering wrong or not, an NDA can and usually does cover more than (protected or capable-of-being-protected) IP. Very often one is motivated by nothing more than a desire not to broadcast the terms one is prepared to give or accept. No idea how passionate Mr Raymond is about information wanting to be free, but I can imagine somebody making business arrangements that involve untrammelled access to, and the right freely to monkey about with, source code, some other aspects of which he’d nevertheless prefer his counterparties keep in petto.

That said, we didn’t like the looks of the NDA that PJ asked us to sign (among other things we didn’t like about them)—overbroad, sloppily drafted, and apparently prepared by somebody unused to agreements that cross national borders.

Mind you, if you’re right and Mr Raymond is able and of a mind to nail the PJs’ collective testicles to the floorboards, I daresay I shall manage to put a brave face on it.

It’s that simple.

In any case, it’s apparently easier than one might think to spend $4m on weblogs.

He keeps on promising to do that, but then he keeps on coming back.

It was a website I enjoyed a good deal, a good deal of time ago.

And I do actually think that due to their actions, blogs like LGF and Harry’s Place are responsible for their comments section, if only because if you annoy these people enough they will ban you. To the best of my knowledge no commenter has EVER been banned from HP for being too ‘racist’ or ‘right wing’, whereas people are banned for challenging ‘Harry’ or being too vehemently against the war all the time.