Great money. Flexible hours.

Mike:
Well, you can tell it's the slowest paht of baseball season when someone stahts the inevitable "state of the baseball blogahspheah" posts …

 

---

Doug:
Christ, spare me the passive aggressive melodrama.

 

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Mike:
Two words that should nevah be used in the same sentence: bloggah and revenue model.

 

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Doug:
Bloggahs discussing making money from blogging is like watching a piss pahty at a midget fahm.

 

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Mike:
If you want to make a living on the web and your only skill is pomposity then you have two choices: porn or porn.

 

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Doug:
Absolutely. Even the lowly tug job video will make more sweet moolah in a day than all the baseball blogs in the world combined make in a month.

 

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Mike:
And talk about your low barrier for entry, for a standard first person crank yank all you need is a camcorder and a dextrous slut (wearing glasses and prone to giggling, preferably).

 

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Doug:
And if somebody says, "Well, isn't that shallow, empty, and degrading?" I say, "Exactly. Just like blogging 'cept you get paid to do it!"

 

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Author's Notes
The "piss party" line was taken from this post by Moxie.

Comments

[COD]

//If you want to make a living on the web and your only skill is pomposity then you have two choices: porn or porn.//

Maybe the truest thing ever spoken by one of the characters!

[Jason O.]

Let's see:

the WSJ online is profitable.
EBay is profitable.
Porn is very profitable.
itunes is profitable.

Not many similarities. The content has to marry well with the medium to thrive, I guess.

[Kaz]

Yet, you publish non-porn 5x a week, h.b.

A freakin' saint, in my book.

[Chris]

I think they are very similar Jason. All four of your examples took inefficient markets and made them more efficient by making it easier for buyer and seller to connect, lowering the costs on both ends in the process.

Except for Itunes maybe. Due to the monopoly like position of RIAA, the cost structure hasn't changed much. Apple is paying about 75 cents per song sold, and I don't think a 25% GM quite covers the overhead. I suspect Itunes is still a loss leader to sell Ipods.

[h.b.]

To be fair, a couple of bloggers, have managed to spin their blogging into full time gigs, even a baseball blogger, David Pinto for instance.

Though I'm not sure how he does it. Either the site is getting way more traffic and consequent ad impression revenue than I think it does or David has a very austere lifestyle, or maybe it's a little of both.

This site gets only a fraction of Pinto's numbers, and in ad revenue I make about 7% of the bare min I'd need to make to "survive." (Granted, I have some expensive tastes and habits I don't really want to give up at this point in my life.)

So maybe if Baseball Musings gets 10x's the traffic I do, then it makes sense that David can make that his full time gig.

I need more readers! Heh.

[Jason O.]

Chris, you argue the obvious. The internet reduces the acquisition costs of every type of information or service...for the buyer, or seeker.

As the internet business model mass-grave of the last 10 years demonstrates, it's extremely difficult for the provider (seller) to capture value as millions of informed consumers continuously drive prices down.

There's something that differentiates those online businesses that can't be described in the abstract.

Take ebay: Why did every other website try to build an online community and they're all out of business? But: Meg Whitman says it's what makes her successful.

[h.b.]

Rumor has it The Globe is putting all their sports content behind a subscription firewall.

Subscribers to the dead tree version will automatically get free online access.

All others will pay a fee per one time, monthly, or yearly.

Must admit I'd be happy to see the CHB and some others get caged off like that, it'll diminish their national reach at least.

[da kine]

Not to bring it into the gutter, but where do tugjobs fit into the porn slope? At the lowest end is, in order: posing, solo, then lesbian, and at the high end is gangbangs and DVDA. Is a tugjob less filthy than a girl-on-girl anal? What if she ends up with the product on her face?

[h.b.]

You wouldn't squeeze (!) the tug job in between solo and lesbian in your list?

Of course, so much depends on your own tastes and mores. What person's nasty is another's blase.

[Jason O.]

Where does bukake fit in to that scale???

[louclinton]

The debate over the cosmic role of tugjobs is a, uh, relief, from what stadium Mrs. Damons headlamps will illuminate come Spring.

[COD]

Ebay is simply the network effect in action. The buyers went there because the sellers were there, and vice versa. It was mostly a first mover advantage, and they didn't make any huge mistakes early on to kill their growth. Then once there, your seller / buyer reputation has value - which is a huge impediment to moving to auctions-r-us.com

[da kine]

Johnny Damon is fucking dead to me. Hey Johnny, have fun in NY with your stripper wife after Georgie makes you chop off your feminine hair, you noodle-armed bitch.

[dewey's Disciple]

Tru dat da kine - nothing could be more right on.

WWJD??
Anything that his evil friggin' master tells him to do.

[illegitimate son of dwight evans]

Fucking Damon. The infield is still a mess, and now we're missing a starting center fielder. An inauspicious start to the dynamic duo era. I remember someone saying awhile back that the Henry junta grabs a franchise, tries to squeeze as much revenue from it as possible and leaves it for dead, and I thought "that's bullshit, who would run a team like that" -- I'm starting to believe.

I hope Marte's got his big-league seasoning by opening day.

[Follower of Tito]

Right on da kine. Johnny Damon is dead to me. This is even worse than Clemens. At least Rogah went to Toronto first, then the Dark Side. Might be the black-hearted Irish in me, but don't let the door hit you on the way out Johnny. Here are the reasons I think he will regret this day in no particular order:

1) He was a huge star in Boston, in NYC, he will be a B-list star at best. To prempt Jason O: Julius Caesar, "I had rather be first in a village than second at Rome."

2) His shoulder must be worse than we knew if the Sox front office aren't willing to get in a bidding war. Sounds like the ball will coming rolling back to the infield this year in the Bronx.

3) JD can't pull every pitch to try and get to the right field porch. As I recall center field in the Bronx is where would-be home runs go to die.

4) Graffanino did pretty well as a lead-off man last year, and I think he has played shortstop before, with excellent speed. If we save $20 million or so, we can get a lot of arms.

5) JD just lost a ton of endorsements. If he thought the fans were going to blame the Sox front office, he and Boras are high. Leave the team you won the WS with for $3 million extra/year...it shows what you truly are..a whore.

[whatadifferenceadaymakes]

Well, you can tell it's the slowest paht of baseball season when someone stahts the inevitable "state of the baseball blogahspheah" posts …

What a difference a day makes.

[whatadifferenceadaymakes]

we can get a lot of arms

Which arms would those be?

Say what you want about Damon, the front office has fucked up ovah, and ovah and ovah this yeah.

The Sox no longer have the highest scoring offense and the pitching ain't great.

[Pond]

Tito makes a good point about Damon's loss of stardom with this switch. For the last two years, he was huge for Red Sox fans. And half of the reason he was such a hit had nothing to do with his playing. There will be no more shaving for charity and you've seen the last beard commercials. I don't think anyone is going to Barnes and Noble for a copy of Idiot either. From now on he will be a end of the batting order outfielder who throws like a girl in a market already stuffed with over-paid, over-arrogant, and under-performing players. I don't see any of my twenty million neighbors trading in their Giambi, Jeter, and A-rod jerseys for a Damon. I don't see anyone trading in their Williams shirts either.

The other half of his appeal did come from his playing ability, but those days are numbered too. The guy had a great season last year, but he also took more than a few days off to recoup. We're not talking about Manny here. He needed that time off; I don't think his shoulder is going to hold up for another four years. Damon did his fair share of damage at Yankee Stadium and he's going to enjoy the fifty feet from home plate to the right field foul pole for awhile, but which is more likely: Damon leading off for the Yankees in 2009 or Damon on the DL sipping martinis in the Rainbow Room with his hand in George's pocket in 2009?

I'm just saying, it's not like losing Bellhorn, but it's not like losing Clemens either.

I would also like to apologize to the Soxaholix and the entire Red Sox community for helping Steinbrenner with this deal by purchasing a ticket to the June 8 Red Sox at Yankees game hours before the announcement last night.

[Jason O.]

Right now, the deal is about a 60/40 split in favor of the red sox. Relax with the knee-jerk Shuaghnessy-esque reaction.

Damon can't fight his age, and if his early 30's decline is significant, the yanks will look stupid while the red sox unloaded a liability. He could be Bernie Williams circa 2005 as soon as '07. (And I love Bernie, he was a clutch hitting force for 10 years)

Even given the fact that Joe is a big-ball manager, how many times will Jeter sacrifice in '06??

Personally, I wanted a dependable CF who batted 9th. Like Preston Wilson or Bubba or Eric Byrnes.

[illegitimate son of dwight evans]

Leave the team you won the WS with for $3 million extra/year...it shows what you truly are..a whore.

Indeed. There's a reason the guy gets booed every time he goes back to KC or Oakland. They learned the lesson we learned: he's the purest moneyman, going to the highest bidder no matter the stakes. I'm not some pollyanna who thinks there's any such thing as loyalty in the age of multi-million-dollar professional sports contracts, but seriously even Nomar expressed more gratitude and desire to stick with the Sox than Damon did.

That being said, I do think the front office fucked up. The spanks didn't even count themselves in the running because they specifically said they wouldn't break the bank to get him, and certainly not for a seven year deal. But I mean seriously, Lucchino was talking about the spanks negotiations like they were happening on Mars. Um, and WHY aren't you keeping extra close tabs on the guy who's about as close to a franchise player as you can get these days? Why aren't you saying "Johnny, tell us what they're offering, we'll try and beat it"? Someone described the signing as "Johnny Damon landing in their lap", and that's about the only way to sum it up. The Sox were napping on this one, and if they had no intention of re-signing him they should already have a proven MLB starter for CF on Opening Day.

Oh well. Here's the rebuilding years. I wonder what Beckett's thinking now.

[illegitimate son of dwight evans]

Jason,

I know Yankee fans aren't prancing with glee right now, but in the balance of power in the East, unless the Sox magically pull Coco Crisp or Brady Clark or Carl Crawford out of some hat, has clearly tipped towards the spanks. Actually I think there's now a deal to be had for Crisp or Crawford, though we'd definitely eating our hat along with it.

Saying the Red Sox unloaded a liability with the Damon deal is an overstatement. Whatever may happen in '07 or '08, Damon's still a threat now, and even if he falls apart in two years it's not like the spanks have never taken on new contracts while paying a guy to spit sunflower seeds on the bench.