Pajama Entrepreneur

Here’s an article in Wired about Michael Arrington’s rise from blogger to mini-media empire. When he started Techcrunch, he had no idea it would turn out to be one of the most influential technology blogs. Unlike boring tech websites run by large media companies, Techcrunch has personality (like its founder) and passion. It’s not written by a machine. There’s a strong voice behind it. Michael does not make apologies about who he is and how he writes. There are a lot of people who don’t like him and what he’s done, but he goes on anyway.

The flipside of success: saying no to advertisers

I also started my blog, Muniwireless.com, without thinking that it would turn into an operation with conferences, seminars and a quarterly magazine. But it did after 2 years of blogging.

The challenge for me (and I suspect every blogger who succeeds in creating a small media enterprise) is this: how do you keep writing passionately without offending your big advertisers? The answer is you can’t. At some point, something you write will piss them off, they’ll threaten to stop advertising and sponsoring your events. What I learned is that you just need to keep writing with passion and serving your readers.

If you start tempering your opinions and writing things to please the advertisers, you won’t have a audience much longer and your advertisers will flee, too. Besides, the tech business is volatile. One of the advertisers on Muniwireless decided to advertise less after a story I had written pissed them off. It was a convenient excuse; their business was not going well. I remember being very upset about their decision, but looking back now, I should have just told them to jump off a cliff. I had to be more diplomatic because Muniwireless was not just about me. There are other people working in the company.

That’s another challenge. When there are others working in your organization, you can’t throw as many temper tantrums as you used to, although if Muniwireless were still a one-person operation, I would have banished that particular advertiser to my 9th Circle of Hell.

At the DLD conference in Munich last January 2007, I spoke to the CEO of a media company about my experiences with advertisers and he said: “The most powerful word in this business is NO. No, I won’t shut up because you want me to. No, I won’t retract my post because I think I’m right.”