Pajamas Media, the online home to a wide range of bloggers, most on the right of the political spectrum, is officially dead. Or rather, will be, come April Fools Day.
Strangely apt, really.
Pajamas is closing down its apparently unprofitable blog network in favor of PJTV, a new subscription-based video website launched by Pajamas Media last year. According to the site, members are expected to pay $37 a year to gain access to PJTV’s video interviews, news reports and general content.
The PJTV “network”, you may remember, recently covered the Republican National Convention and more recently garnered notoriety for sending “Joe the Plumber Self-Promoter” to cover the Israeli bombardment of Gaza.
Now, as I have mentioned before, I’m no economist, but I know that, unless we’re talking about porn, the internet pay-per-view model hasn’t had a lot of success. In the words of a right-leaning blogger, Tools of Renewal:
“PJM’s new hope is PJTV, a pay video site…..I can’t understand why anyone would think it could succeed. The blogger who told me about the end of PJM’s blog network theorizes that the GOP is making PJM its main Internet outlet. That is highly plausible, in view of the unbelievably stupid things the GOP has done over the last few years. Using PJM to make your party popular on the web is like hiring Andy Dick to do sensitivity training…..”
You know, I’d almost pay to see that! With nicer site lay-outs than the Free Republic, and more famous shrieking heads than anywhere else, Pajamas Media was the name I most associated with right-wing blogosphere. It was where I went to find out what triviality was getting Michelle Malkin’s panties in a bunch this week, as well as to read the excellent Balloon Juice blog.
So what happened?
The clever number-cruncher over at Donklephant says Pajamas Media’s business model was hamstrung by the fact that it was, and I’m paraphrasing here, utter crap. After many hypothetical budget calculations, Donklephant has this to say:
“Well, the point of this post was to show everybody that PJM could have paid competitive CPM rates to their bloggers and still made close to $200,000 a year in profit. Obviously that’s not a gold mine, but I think it demonstrates that Roger Simon’s claim that the ad network lost money from day one is the result of extremely poor business decisions, and that all they had to do to make it work was tell their bloggers the truth and simply renegotiate CPM rates. That’s what every other ad network does when the numbers begin to go south.”
Which doesn’t bode well for their new PJTV venture. Presumably, right wing bloggers would make up some of their target demographic, so what are their thoughts on the end of Pajamas as we know it and its latest incarnation, PJTV?
The Anchoress, a Pajamas blogger, opined:
“I sort of saw it coming. I’d noticed that PJM was tightening, creating its identity around a crew of established conservative “name” writers and the bigger bloggers, rather than the sprawling mass of bloggers…
“Also, I noticed that a great deal of PJM’s energy was going toward the PJTV end of it. Not my bag, to be honest. My boredom with “talking head” format, coupled with my deteriorating attention span leads me more to text than video, but I can see where many may believe (perhaps rightly) that text is on the way out and aural/video meets the need for speed and easy digestion.”
Echoing the American Pundit’s stance:
“I, for one, have never taken much interest in PJTV. The price tag, while not outrageous, has been a stumbling block. Even major newspapers have tried that model to no avail. Paying a subscription fee for online commentary seems a bit, well, outdated. Especially when quite a few of the people (Malkin, Green, Spencer, Hinderaker, Hemingway, etc.) on the website’s front page now can be read for free on their own sites.
Noted crackpot Pamela Geller over at Atlas Shrugged had this to say:
“I was one of the original pajama bloggers. I thought PJM was going to rival AP, UPI, Reuters. Finally, a news portal of citizen bloggers and journalists that would counter the Pali stringers and left wing biased journalists of the news gathering agencies. But PJM went off the rails. Simon decided to chase big names for big money, but to what end? Who needed another NRO or WSJ Best of the Web? And unlike the left, where Soros, Hollywood libtards and Google-type asshats embarrassingly fund the leftwing sites vis a vis Moveon.org et al, the right has none of that. None. We live on fumes. G-d bless our small advertisers and our readers who contribute.”
If I know Pam, it’s all somehow the fault of “B. Hussein Obama” and “the Muslims”.
The Opinion Mill blog begs to differ, in a post hilariously entitled “Twilight of the Clods” (I can just hear the strains of Wagner now):
“Daily Kos, Eschaton and Crooks and Liars, as well as the lefty blogs that followed in their train, didn’t spring into being because some daddy wingbucks wrote them phat checks. They developed and thrived because they trafficked in reality, and in a media realm dominated by the likes of Michelle Malkin, Rush Limbaugh and Thomas Friedman, reality was and is a scarce and valuable commodity.”
Perhaps it all boils down to scale and readership? I think Opinion Mill put it rather succintly when he wrote:
“Wingers have no shortage of propaganda spigots to sup from, and while they are a breed with a seemingly endless capacity for hearing the same nonsense over and over, there are only so many hours in a day, and one cannot live at one’s computer. When the airwaves and op-ed pages are full of professional ranters, amateurs can’t expect much of a crowd for their flea-circus versions.”
Fortunately for us, Michelle Malkin isn’t going anywhere. What would I do without her? But it seems the “free market” the Republicans are always banging on about has indeed spoken; it said, “Pajamas Media: fail”.