paidContent

» see paidcontent.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Thirty million dollars for a blog. That number is from July 2008, when Guardian Media Group bought ContentNext, and it is the reason anyone outside the media-business beat ever heard the name paidContent at all.

The blog started in 2002 and it was one man, Rafat Ali, writing about a single question: who is making money from digital content. In 2002 that question sounded like a joke. The dot-com collapse was still fresh, everything online was free and losing money, and the phrase "paid content" was mostly used by executives to describe a thing they wished existed. Ali covered it as if it were already a real industry, which turned out to be the correct bet by about six years.

It grew into ContentNext, which added a UK edition alongside two spinoffs: mocoNews for the mobile content business, and contentSutra for the Indian market. Offices in Santa Monica and New York. Nathan Richardson, out of Yahoo Finance, came in as chief executive. What had been a blog became a small trade publisher covering the money side of media for the people who worked in it.

I read almost none of it at the time. Media-business trade press was not my beat in 2008 and I was in a different industry in a different country, so this grave is reconstruction rather than memory. What makes it worth writing is the arc of the price tag.

~ the case file ~

~ thirty million for a blog ~

The Guardian deal in July 2008 landed at the peak of a specific belief: that a legacy newspaper could buy its way into the digital future by acquiring the people who already understood it. Guardian Media Group was not alone. Every large publisher that decade bought something small and native and hoped the thinking would spread upward through the organization.

It rarely worked, and the reason was structural rather than personal. What the acquirer wanted was the judgment of a handful of writers, and judgment does not transfer when you put it inside a much larger company with its own budget cycles. Rafat Ali announced his departure in May 2010, less than two years after the sale, which is roughly how long a founder's earnout runs.

~ the second sale ~

GigaOm acquired ContentNext Media on 8 February 2012. By then Guardian Media Group was cutting back hard and the digital acquisitions of the previous decade were being written down across the industry. The reported price was not close to thirty million.

GigaOm ran paidContent as a separate brand for a while and then stopped. On 12 November 2013 it was merged into GigaOm proper, meaning the archive stayed reachable and the name came off the front of it. That is the quietest way a publication ends: not a farewell post, just a redirect and a change of logo at the top of the same stories.

~ what the merge erased ~

GigaOm itself ran out of money and stopped publishing abruptly in March 2015, sixteen months after absorbing paidContent, so the masthead that swallowed it did not last much longer than the swallowing. The archives were eventually revived under new ownership, but the newsroom that made either brand worth reading was gone by then.

Today paidcontent.org resolves to a page about online casino payout rates. Nothing dramatic happened, somebody just let the registration lapse and somebody else picked it up, which is what happens to a domain when the company that owned it has itself been merged twice. The blog that spent eleven years asking who pays for content ended up being paid for by affiliate gambling links, and there is no way to write that sentence without it sounding arranged.

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