Ensight – Jeremy Wright

Here is the original text submitted to the wire services of the recent article on this whole doodad:

Blogger sells his popular web diary for $15k: FIRSTS I Jeremy Wright’s blog sparked a bidding war. Next it might spark an industry
Vancouver Sun
Saturday, September 25, 2004
Page: A5
Section: News
Byline: Sarah Staples
Source: CanWest News Service

Canadian blogger Jeremy Wright is about to pocket $15,000 from the sale of his popular web diary, joining a select group of pioneers: the Blog-preneurs.

The first serious offer for Ensight.org came early last week, out of the blue. Wright threw open the bidding and within hours had two more offers, each one considerably upping the ante. Prospective buyers were attracted by the blog’s popularity, the income it reaps from advertising, and what Wright calls the “value proposition.”

“Blogs grow. Fast. Continuously. Ensight’s enjoyed a roughly 20 to 30 per cent monthly growth rate for the last year and a half. Think about that. Traffic doubling every four months.

“Crazy,” he crowed online after the sale. “Buying blogs would be a fast way to build a media company.”

Blogging traditionally conjures images of independent-minded scribes producing amusing, opinionated, often intimate online journals that are akin to diaries. Ensight.org, a carefully crafted discourse on business and technology issues, is one of several blogs that have become so popular they are breaking down that perception.

Since starting the blog last May, Wright, 25, who manages computer servers at a hospital in Winnipeg, has met friends in high places in tech companies across North America. And he’s become an opinion leader in his own right, most recently granting interviews to the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and others on the subject of Google’s initial public offering.

The search engine has contributed to Wright’s success because it essentially rates each website’s popularity based on how often it’s updated, and how many other sites link to it. Every fellow blogger who links to Ensight increases its visibility with Google, and therefore ups its commercial value. More than 100,000 readers scan the blog every month, and thousands more receive a daily update via their handhelds or e-mail inbox. Wright posts four or five messages a day, for a total of almost 2,000 missives so far.

The original offer of $2,500 was from a businessman who wanted the site “purely for its traffic,” Wright said.

“With 100,000 people you’ve got ’search-engine power’,” he said. “Say you want to start a retail site; all your products would get indexed instantly [by Google] and they’d be searchable.” It’s a way online businesses can manipulate the search engine to develop visibility.”

The offer he accepted comes from an American web-hosting company that, in addition to the $15,000 US as a kind of signing bonus, will pay Wright a monthly fee and let him keep full editorial control over the blog, in exchange for all the advertising revenue.

“Most people who are making money off of blogs are kind of barely making money to support their blog habits, so it’s an interesting milestone,” said French Caldwell, vice-president and research director for Gartner, a global IT market-research firm that will issue a major report this September tracking the exponential growth of blogging. “It shows there is real intellectual property there, in a blog.”

Blogs are proliferating as corporations and media conglomerates start their own, but there are few stars of the business — and they are in high demand.

In 1999, the Poynter Institute, a Florida-based non-profit journalism foundation, bought the domain name MediaGossip .com, and hired its author, Jim Romenesko, after seeing that blog, about the business of journalism, become a behemoth commanding upwards of a million readers per month.

Bloggers have been hired to work for Slate.com, an influential online current-affairs magazine, while Blog-preneurs Nick Denton and Jason Calacanis are fast becoming Net-publishing moguls by conceiving of interesting topics, then hiring really good writers to blog them.

Calacanis, for his part, makes a tidy living off niche offerings like “Pregnancy, baby care and parenting.”

When Romenesko launched a new blog in August, it garnered several thousand hits immediately. “It’s sometimes hard for a [mainstream media] news site to launch and instantly expect the kind of popularity some established blogs have.”

Wright claims Enright.org is the first blog to be sold as a blog — instead of the author simply being lured away to write for someone else. And it may be the first time a blog has sold for more than the $200 value of its domain name.

For now, he’s taking his wife, who is pregnant with their second child, on the honeymoon they never had. But there have also been plenty of calls from bloggers seeking to pool resources to create a larger online publishing Blog-gomerate.

“This could be the start of something,” a writer named BusinessPundit enthused.

“Could someone [start] blogs, building the brand and then selling them off? If you could sell a handful each year for $10 to $15K a piece, that would be pretty decent. And you don’t even have to do it full-time.”

Here is a copy of another paper where it ran, so you can see the pic of ol’ happy face (me).

Note that some of the quotes and such are off, but I didn’t mind that so much. To me this article was never about “me” but about what this means for blogging, so I’m quite happy to be misquoted if that’s what it takes. Besides, most of the misquotes are pompous enough to be me anyways.