PJ Media: E Unum, Pluribus
The division of Pajamas Media into two groups, one focusing on content, the other on advertising, became public over the weekend, relieving me of some gentleman's nondisclosure agreements. Of all places, the LA Voice has the story close to right , though they don't see the failure of symbiosis between the two halves. Allow me.
The logic for both parts under one roof is simply stated: Both would depend on bloggers as the element of supply, of either bylined content, or audience and attention. But they sell to very different markets. The content side must sell to content packagers or consumers. The advertising side sells, well, to advertisers.
It's somewhat axiomatic that a startup gets one bet. That is, one product or service, to one market. There are a lot of reasons, ranging from management bandwidth to capital requirements of forming two sales forces to conflicting demands from different sets of customers. They were all relevant in this situation.
Marc and Roger can attest that I, my partners, and other business plan reviewers banged on them to cut the initial set of business propositions down to one bullet point, and focus on it. But there were two legitimate business opportunities inside the plan, each with potential support from investors and backing from part of the team. Roger is notably a content guy, Marc is a systems architect and manager. After some further input from the market (in the form of potential investors, advertisers, partners and a few bloggers), it was evident that a Solomonic solution was the best one in this case. There are now two entities that will each attempt to serve the blogging community and its own set of customers.
Unfortunately for any attempts to paint this as a politically driven break up, that just isn't in the story. So far as I can tell, Roger is no 'rabid conservative' nor is Marc a 'vehement liberal' (though he is still Armed), regardless of anyone who wants to pick a fight on their behalf, and are anyway too smart to let such differences get in the way of a logical outcome. They, Charles, and others concerned have gone through a difficult passage of having to rejig a business plan while at the center of publicity and curiosity, and have come to a reasonable conclusion. I wish both entities the very best of success.
