Calacanis, Wonkette, HuffPo’s Lerer hold panel in Times Square
From FishBowlNY, a paraphrased transcript of New Yorker writer Ken Auletta’s interview with Ana Marie Cox, Jason Calacanis, and HuffPo’s Kenneth Lerer:
Auletta: How do you make money on blogs?
Lerer: Advertising. I think we’ll do exceptionally well. I wasn’t sure in the beginning. Now, I’m quite sure.
Calacanis: [Referring to TimesSelect] Put more news behind the firewall. That just means more clicks to me! Where’s Martin [Nisenholtz]? Put more stuff there! You won’t get indexed by google. I think [the Times] is putting things behind the fire wall as a hedge against a fall in advertising.
Wonkette: I get a pay check.
So Calacanis is as loud in person as in text.
Calacanis: Yahoo! Now, they’re the big threat. They have the distribution, the advertising relationships online. They will be the arbitrage between Google ad sense and …[we missed this last part. sorry.]
AOL. AOL will be part of Google or Microsoft in the future.
Auletta: Speaking of AOL, have you been considering selling out to them?
Calacanis [not missing a beat]: News Corp. Microsoft. Google. Then AOL. That order. Wanna talk after this? [guffaws] … I wouldn’t want to sell to someone who’d want to filter bloggers though. It would take a very big, a very big visionary company, with lots of cash [audience laughs] to buy us.
Lerer was insightful; I need to keep track of this guy:
Lerer: [Speaking about how the blog is not a disintermediating medium]. I don’t see it as so new. Just an evolution. No different what’s happening now than what happened 200 years ago [with the printing press, we presume, he means].
The conversation turned to the future of the blog model.
Lerer: The format of blogs is unappetizing to me. It is difficult to get through them. They will morph into something else… will evolve into a group blog with many opinions.
Cox treats it like a black box:
Auletta to Anna: How do you see the future of blogs?
Wonkette: The business model of blogs is uncertain. I know I get a check every month… I pay my ISP…
Calacanis: I’ll pay for your ISP. [Then, he mumbled something about how well all of his bloggers are treated and how they get 50% of something or other].
Audience member: Why don’t you take him up on his offer?
Calacanis: She doesn’t like me.
Wonkette: That’s what I was about to say.
Oh snap. This time I have to side with Calacanis, who explains that he poached Denton’s Gizmodo writer last year.
Read the whole transcript. It’s gold. Calacanis is, as always, the bluntest man in the room.
This entry was posted by Nick Douglas on Thursday, September 29th, 2005 at 12:03 am and is filed under Ana Marie Cox, Arianna Huffington, Gawker Media, Jason Calacanis, Nick Denton, Weblogs, Inc.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
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