Twilight of the Blogs

As a cultural phenomenon, blogs are in their gangly adolescence. Every day, thousands of people around the world launch their blogs on LiveJournal or the Iranian equivalent. But as businesses, blogs may have peaked. There are troubling signs—akin to the 1999 warnings about the Internet bubble—that suggest blogs have just hit their top.

The Magazine Cover Indicator: That's a term coined by Barry Ritholtz, a blogger and hedge-fund manager. Being plastered on the front of a national magazine is fatal for an investment trend. Remember Time's infamous anointing of Amazon.com Jeffrey Bezos as the "Man of the Year" for 1999? More recently, Time's crack trend-sniffing squad was working overtime to prepare this week's cover package on Google just as the stock began to melt down. New York isn't quite a national magazine, but its recent blog cover story will no doubt be quickly copied by the newsweeklies. (In the article, Clive Thompson concludes that the blog industry has already tri-furcated into an "A-list of a few extremely lucky, well-trafficked blogs—then hordes of people stuck on the B-list or C-list, also-rans who can't figure out why their audiences stay so comparatively puny no matter how hard they work." In other words, a few people will make money—journalist money, not Wall Street money—and the hordes of late joiners will make nothing.)