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Om Malik: Pioneering Blogs (Part 8)

Posted on Friday, Jun 8th 2007

Om Malik was one of the pioneers of the blogging movement. Here, he discusses his early days of blogging.

SM: How did people find out about your blog? The mainstream media was certainly not talking about blogs yet. OM: I think there were a bunch of us talking about it. It was intriguing for me personally because it impacted what I was doing. I was working for a monthly magazine, but I was talking to 20 people a day. I had all of this information which was just redundant by the time the magazine came out. I said “this is just stupid”. It was ideal to put it out on the web every day, and that was it. That was a big breakthrough moment for me. I would just do it, and I would send people emails and tell them I wrote about them. It started that whole dialogue. Most of my readers were people I wrote about. People who were featured in the book, people who were interested in the telecom scandal. From there it just grew. Blogging is a lot of work.

SM: Tell me about it! OM: People don’t realize how much work it is. Everybody thinks you can just set up a blog and you get it going. If you want to do this seriously, it takes work. For me it got addictive. As soon as someone left a comment I would read it.

As a journalist, it was very empowering. I said “people can read my work and comment right away”. It was a very passionate community. So, I started doing more and more of it. I will always be a news reporter, and I cannot ever deny that. A part of me, though, is now a blogger. I was working for a monthly magazine, so this was an ideal fit for me. I kept the bigger stories for the magazine, but the smaller ones I published in the blog. Very early on I learned it was a conversation, not a news report.

By 2003 it was really only doing 25,000 visitors a month. Around April of 2006 something happened. I don’t know what it is, but whatever it was, I started seeing the traffic double on a monthly basis. More visitors, more people. There was a story I broke about LiveJournal and Typecast merging and that helped a lot because suddenly there were a lot of non-telecom type people reading it.

There was no other outlet, so I put it out there. I did more of those stories, and developed this blend of musing and blogging which is what you see on a daily basis. I have cut back on my personality driven prose a little bit because it is not appropriate at times.

In April 2006, with the traffic growing, I was talking to Toni Schneider who is the CEO of Automatic, the company behind WordPress, and he basically was telling me to start doing this full time.

For a while, whenever I would meet people at an event, I would get asked when was I going to quit my day job and do this full time. All of these people were outsiders. I could not figure out why they were saying this. One day I went to see some friends from True Ventures, and they told me to just do it. They gave me a check, and told me to go with it.

I did not jump on it right away, I had already started talking with a bunch of other VCs to hash out a gameplan. Some thought there was a media disruption coming, and if one could turn blogging into a business there would be a way to make money from it. I had about three or four months of esoteric conversations like that. This was in 2005, and we knew the media mix would be interesting and could go into flux for a long time.

When I left Business 2.0 in June 2006, there was no company, it was just me. I basically convinced my first employee, Katie from Red Herring, to come on board and we were off to the races on July 5th. The same site, nothing changed, and everything has been a 100 meter sprint since. It has been amazing, and we are coming up on our first anniversary now.

[to be continued]

[Part 7]
[Part 6]
[Part 5]
[Part 4]
[Part 3]
[Part 2]
[Part 1]