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February 20, 2006
An uncertain future for pure-play blogging startups
Some news out of Switzerland has the a:c euro wondering about the future of pure-play blog startups.
Today we heard from Stephane Pictet, co-founder and CEO of Virtual Network in Nyon, that his small team of developers put together in three months a new blogging platform for his firm’s popular web sites, Romandie.com, musique.com and jeu.com. These are highly-trafficked, French language web-sites, whose users are potential casual bloggers, basically newcomers to online publishing in the blog format.
Virtual Network could have undertaken a partnership with one of the established players active in the Swiss and French market, but Pictet told us that it was “five times” cheaper to build rather then buy space on an existing platform. (He declined to provide names of blog software vendors with the pricey offers.)
This is not very good news for pure-play blog publishing startups. If it is this easy for a web savvy startup to roll its own “ergonomic” and user friendly blog platform (based on open the pblogs open source software distribution), the future for pure-play blog publishing platforms, such as Wordpress, Kaywa, Six Apart, Bloggers.it, Overblog, or any of the others that are active in the region, is going to be more limited, particularly among casual bloggers, than the hype suggests.
There is nothing stopping an OpenBC or a Stardoll, sites that have hundreds of thousands of regular users and subscribers, to decide to develop their own publishing platform for user-generated content. We think that a casual blogger is more likley to use the publishing software on offer from their community of interest than look further afield.
Clearly, there are some publishers and content developers that will need a professional platform, such as those on offer from Wordpress or Six Apart, but how big is that market niche?
Posted on February 20, 2006 11:17 AM | Posted to Web 2.0 | Permalink
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