Netzfischer

Boing Boing ist mit Sicherheit eines des bekanntesten und meistgelesenen Blogs weltweilt. Warum das Blog so erfolgreich ist und wie es dazu kam, hat Fast Company in einem längeren Artikel über die Geschichte von Boing Boing ergründet.

Ein wichtiger Faktor ist anscheinend, dass es die ganze Zeit ein Hobbyprojekt geblieben ist.

We know what happens next: This hobby morphs into a successful business. But Boing Boing’s version of that tale is a little different. Frauenfelder and his partners didn’t rake in investment capital, recruit a big staff and a hotshot CEO, or otherwise attempt to leverage themselves into a “real” media company. They didn’t even rent an office. They continued to treat their site as a side project, even as it became a business with revenue comfortably in the seven figures. Basically, they declined to professionalize. You could say they refused to grow up.

Ein sehr lukratives allerdings. Schon relativ früh konnten die Betreiber einen Umsatz von $27.000 verbuchen.

They named Google, Apple, O’Reilly Media, and Wired. “I called them and said, ‘The most linked-to blog in the world is going to be open to marketers.’ ” He asked for a three-month minimum commitment, at $3,000 a month, for a rotating spot in a noticeable but nonintrusive ad box. Apple begged off, but the other three agreed. “So all of a sudden, these guys had $27,000 of income for the quarter.” Boing Boing was in business.

Heutzutage dürfte es etwas mehr sein, die Beuscherzahlen sind sehr hoch:

According to Quantcast data, it gets about 2.5 million unique visitors a month, racking up 9.8 million page views, a traffic increase of around 20% over 2009. It attracts blue-chip advertisers such as American Express and Verizon. It makes a nice living for its founders and a handful of contract employees.

Bis heute ist es ein “Hobbyprojekt”, auch wenn es so scheint, als könnten die Betreiber allein vom Bloggen leben. Und das mit Dingen, die nicht redaktionell geplant, sondern eher nach einem Zufalls- und Geschmacksprinzip ihren Weg ins Blog finden.

Einen ersten Schub hat das Blog allerdings durch die klassichen Medien erfahren – wie das so oft passiert.

For a year or so, he used the Blogger software he’d learned about to post short items on boingboing.net, attracting an audience of a few hundred people a day. In January 2001, he got curious about what was then intense speculation about a new creation from inventor Dean Kamen that was later to be the subject of a book called Code Name Ginger. Searching an online patent database for Kamen’s name, Frauenfelder found a drawing of what looked like a person riding an old-fashioned push lawn mower (as we now know, this would be the Segway). He posted a link, CNN picked up on it, and boingboing.net racked up 5,000 visits in a day.

Weitere interessante Insights über das Blog, die Autoren und deren Hauptberufe gibt es in dem Fast Company Artikel. Sehr lesenswert.