Oliver Starr Quits Blognation, Says Sam Sethi Is Cheat And Liar

Oliver Starr is not my favorite person. In one of the many roles he has head in recent years, he attacked me personally -- seemed actually to threaten me in some vague, blackmailish way -- when I suggested that Guidewire, where was momentarily working, was going to have real difficulty selling expensive reports on the tech world (see The Guidewire Report: A Bit Old Media, Don't You Think?). It's truly one of the oddest comments I have ever received at /Message.

But Oliver's harangue -- copied on Techcrunch by Duncan Riley (Blognation Meltdown: Writers Never Paid, Promises Not Kept) -- beats that screed hands down.

Here Oliver is clearly trying to bring down Blognation as a company, if it is in fact a company at all, or just a façade wrapped around Sam Sethi's ego, as Starr suggests:

[...]

I think this whole Blognation scam is all about one thing; Sam Sethi’s ego. You got tweaked by Michael Arrington last year and now you’re hell bent on showing up at Le Web with a dozen bloggers to back you up; your triumphant return to the scene of your demise - that’s right, you’ll show Mike and Loic and the world that no one fucks with Sam Sethi. You’ll show them that you’ve built - in less than a year - a blogging empire with bloggers from all over the world reporting 24 hours a day on all the topics the tech world wants to read about. You’ll talk about your advertising play and your new media properties, you’ll boast about your wine cellar and the possibility of hiring some huge name bloggers to round out your team.

I’m sure this will be punctuated by haughty tweets with what you think are big-brained ideas - your obvious effort - to be one of those smart cool kids who launch companies like twitter or Wua.la. You’ll probably stay at a very nice hotel in Paris and encourage all your bloggers to do so too.

And to get them to do so you’ll have convinced each and every one of them to pull the funds from their own dwindling bank accounts because the funding is in… and only has to be held by the bank for just a few more days…

Yes, I’m sure that Paris will be triumphant for you except for one teeny, tiny, itsy, bitsy little detail. Trivial in your mind but oh so important in the real world. Your big return, your blogging network, the content in every post, and nearly everything you’ve said or written about Blognation; it’s all based upon lies…

And when that dirty truth leaks out - there won’t be anywhere on earth you can run where the truth won’t find you. (not to mention the lawsuits that are sure to follow close behind)

Sincerely,

Oliver Starr

If even one half of what Starr says is true, it is very dark days for Blognation indeed.

I have had some experience in the blog network arena, since I worked at Corante for several years, initially as a non-paid blogger -- we all were, in those odd days -- and later as a partner with the oh-so-powerful sounding title of President. However, there was very little to preside over. While we had a pile of blogs, 50 or more of them, only a handful drew any serious traffic, and many were outright dead. When I left, and shut down my blog there, Get Real, I was something like 15%-20% of the traffic of the whole company.

It's a slow process to drive traffic to a blog, even with the built-in amplification effects that come with cross-linking in a network. It took me more than nine months to get /Message back to where Get Real had been in terms of impacts and growing an active community of readers. During which I didn't make a nickel. Hell, I am still only making a few hundred dollars a month directly from /Message.

I wouldn't recommend that building a blogging network -- especially in the tech space -- is going to be a slam dunk. There are so many bright minds writing about tech, and so few with truly deep perspectives and true voice.

b5 Media has developed an alternative strategy -- I am a member of the advisory board -- which makes real sense. I have always believed that you can't create communities: you can only find and support existing communities. Jeremy Wright and his partners have over 290 blogs with over 10 million unique visitors per month, ranging over topics as broad as bass fishing and blogging, knitting and city-specific travel.

Any way, the professionalization and scaling of blogs is an iffy thing. It's not just a matter of rounding up a bunch of bigmouthed essayists. The world is full of them, as Oliver Starr demonstrates. Getting a sustainable business model working, including some sort of acceptable revenue share with aspiring pundits, is very dicey.

My sense is that Blognation has hit the classic service business start-up problem: fixed expenses and variable income. Solving that problem by not paying workers who expect -- and depend on -- a check every month leads to this sort of mess. We'll have to see if Sethi can salvage anything from this collision, but if Starr's declarations are supported by other authors it might be lights out at Blognation.

Comments

[Triona Carey]

great idea, bad driver. I can personally back up Oliver's assertions about lying and non-payment.