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BOLDING BILL DUE
Who knew that running a blog was so expensive?
As has been openly and extensively discussed elsewhere on the site previously, Margo was paying Hamish and Kerri to edit comments and articles respectively, and Wayne for the Daily Briefing. Together with various other payments for hosting and banking fees and technical costs, she had personally paid bills of around $44,000 from the launch of the independent site in August.
No wonder she went broke. That works out at around $400 per day to edit a site that looked as though it was unedited anyway; at that rate, she’d have burned through more than $140,000 if Webdiary survived for just one year.
UPDATE. Let’s see what Webdiary fans think ...
Simon Ellis: “This is not failure - this is success ... Once the pressure eases and the tears dry you’ll see Webdiary for the roaring success that it was.”
Mark Jeanes: “You didn’t fail. You succeeded.”
Peter Maigret: “You ARE on the right track.”
Tom Sadler: “You certainly can’t call it a failure.”
Okay; let’s try “disaster”. Margo spent $44,000 in 108 days on a blog, for God’s sake. And how did she spend it? Not on commissioning original reporting or sending reporters to cover events or securing interviews with newsworthy folk or any form of online innovation—the site doesn’t even have a search function, or a PayPal button, or advertising—but on dicking around with comments and hiring a “reporter” whose let-me-tell-you-what’s-in-the-papers role apparently left him with no time to actually report.
More on that imbecilic comments policy: because all comments were moderated (heavily, sometimes being re-written) it had the effect of closing down the site when no moderators were on hand to add the crucial bold tags or whatever. The spontaneous, lively possibilities of comments were killed; by treating comments as mini-essays, Margo actually spent money to make her site worse.
And the content reeked. Even lefties rarely linked to it; maybe Margo should have spent some of that cash bribing them. Or she could have sponsored a World Vision kid for 122 years. Still, you can’t call it a failure.
UPDATE II. Brother Hamish explains the magic of bolding.
UPDATE III. Pixy Misa writes: “I run mu.nu, which consists of around 200 blogs, plus a number of web forums and other sites. One month of Webdiary’s budget would run mu.nu for two years.”
UPDATE IV. An earlier item on Margo’s bizarre editing policy in which she claimed to have spent two-thirds of her SMH payments coping “with the comments load” at her old site. Also, this from comments editor Kerri Browne: “Most of the comments editors’ time is spent correcting the formatting of posts. It takes two mouse clicks to delete an abusive post, yet at least eight keystrokes to add the tags to bold the name of the person the poster is addressing.” All up, Margo might be $60,000 out of pocket over this.
Wasnt Wayno getting $1000 a week for The Weekly Briefing thing? That’s probably where it all went pear shaped.
I’d bite my tongue and edit the comments and articles and compile the news for Webdiary for $300 a week. (underemployed here at the mo - anyone got some part time work for me? lol)Posted by Lucky Nutsacks on 2005 12 08 at 03:08 AM • permalinkCheck out Sanderson’s latest moronic statement in his Daily Briefing (8/12/05 - Permalink not working)...
“It would be great to have some of the Webdiary readers who have come to appreciate TDB join it as subscribers.”
“Now that you’ve enjoyed my plagiarised crap free of charge, perhaps you’d like to pay for it?”
Posted by HisHineness on 2005 12 08 at 03:39 AM • permalinkNo wonder she went broke. That works out at around $400 per day to edit a site that looked as though it was unedited anyway…
To be fair, we don’t know how much editing was needed to make the barkings of Webdiary’s guest and resident moonbats as coherent as it was. $400 a day may have been a bargain.
Posted by blandwagon on 2005 12 08 at 04:05 AM • permalinkThis excerpt comes from the Daily Briefing:
Child-rearing, how thing have changed
The Times flicks through back issues of the magazine Nursery World which has just turned 80, and notices that ideas about child-rearing have changed over the years. “Is your toddler a fussy eater? Then starve him for 24 hours and he will soon eat anything. Your baby won’t sleep through the night? Simple: smack her until she stops crying.”A shame this parenting advice doesn’t work on Margo.
What a retard. The trainwreck was foreseen by pretty near everyone on this site. Of course, it was all opaque to the Margronk.
Still, it was bloody funny while it lasted. paying people to edit comments on a blog, shelling out your redundancy package, pretending to set up a business.
Absolute cluelessness and blithering stupidity, what a delightfully funny combination.
Guess Margronk will be hunting one of those cushy ABC jobs that pay you lots for doing stuff-all.
What else is the old rugmuncher good for?
MarkL
canberra#12
“What else is the old rugmuncher good for?”I’m thinking the catwalks of Paris and New York beckon.
Posted by Hank Reardon on 2005 12 08 at 06:49 AM • permalinkSome old poof on Radio National earlier this evening ended his shift by saying he had some very bad news. I thought, shit, who died? The very bad news was that Margo Kingston has retired from blogging and journalism.
And before you ask why I was listening to Radio National, it’s only because News Radio was running Senate broadcast and Mad Kerry Nettle was nettling.
Posted by Oafish and Infantile on 2005 12 08 at 06:56 AM • permalinkI had assumed that some wealthy moonbat had donated vast sums, enabling Margo to waste so much for so little.
I feel a bit sorry for her if it was her own savings.
Never mind, I’m sure she can get a good job in a <strike>sheltered workshop</strike> university somewhere.
Posted by Evil Pundit on 2005 12 08 at 07:14 AM • permalinkThe one I like best is the bit from Murray Barnard (commenter just above Mark Jeanes on the site).
Good luck ... it is your journey ... may it be a beautiful one ... we love you Margo.
Could this be the first time the words ‘Margo’ and ‘beautiful’ have been in the same sentence?
Like: ‘Margo, you haven’t got the face of a bulldog chewing a wasp - you’re Claudia Schiffer…’
Posted by Flying Giraffe on 2005 12 08 at 07:29 AM • permalinkLet me get this straight….she blew her OWN SAVINGS on paying these clowns to edit COMMENTS?!
COMMENTS, for God’s sake?
Posted by Quentin George on 2005 12 08 at 08:01 AM • permalinkThe bottom will now fall out of the bold tags market. Hamish has revealed the holy grail. If anybody on webdiary can understand his post it will be in their minds the closest thing to money growing on trees.
Posted by Hank Reardon on 2005 12 08 at 08:04 AM • permalink$44K for that drek? I am totally gobsmacked. How on earth could you blow $44K in four months on a BLOG for God’s sake?
I am sincerely pleased that the somewhat vague idea of issuing shares in this Webdiary tripe never eventuated. Whilst I can giggle about the moonbat losing her hard earned cash on her personally owned and dubious folly, I would be less than amused if this “enterprise” had managed to suck in the poor deluded but well meaning fools who reckon the sun beamed from the Margoyle’s nether regions.
I have a glimmer of regret in one way, in that we won’t have the Margoyle to kick around any more (apologies to Tricky Dicky) It was seriously good fun over the years.
Posted by Pedro the Ignorant on 2005 12 08 at 08:06 AM • permalinkMargo spent $44,000 in 108 days on a blog
And these people think they’re qualified to run Austalia. Just think of the tens of thousands she could have saved on bold-tag editing alone just by using, say, Blogspot. The incompetence is mind boggling.
Posted by Bruce Rheinstein on 2005 12 08 at 08:06 AM • permalinkThe blog was bankrupt, but successful!
Posted by Son of a Pig and a Monkey on 2005 12 08 at 08:19 AM • permalinkI run mu.nu, which consists of around 200 blogs, plus a number of web forums and other sites.
One month of Webdiary’s budget would run mu.nu for two years. (It would be even more, but we just upgraded to new servers to allow for growth.)
And we get actual traffic, about a terabyte a month.
Of course, we don’t edit comments.
Hmm, $44 thousand on a blog that was supposed to enlighten us all. Now it’s gone.
In the U.S., we’ve spent about $44 trillion to end poverty. And we’re still at it.
What’s the lesson for liberals?
Yoke the taxpayers so you never run out of money.
Posted by Rittenhouse on 2005 12 08 at 08:42 AM • permalink#20 - Quentin - yes, let me show you how:
“Could you please confirm: Ms Kingston generiously spent her life’s savings to pay for the skills and services of multiple editors who toiled over WebDiary day and night and on weekends to ensure that comments arrived in front of valued readers and the WD community in a beautifully constructed manner, inclusive of formatting tags, placed just so? May God bless them, one and all.
Posted - Quentin”
Hmm, that $44,000 will keep The Coalition of the Swilling going for approximately 352 years.
Posted by Mr. Bingley on 2005 12 08 at 09:04 AM • permalinkCouldn’t she just get a grant or something? I’ve never known a leftist who couldn’t wheedle a bag of money from some guilt-ridden foundation or other.
Posted by Andrea Harris, Administrator on 2005 12 08 at 09:17 AM • permalinkBy the way, $44000 would keep this site going for about 162 years.
Posted by Andrea Harris, Administrator on 2005 12 08 at 09:19 AM • permalinkCan I be the first one to say that $44,000 (whatever that is when you convert the seashells you people use to real American money) is not necessarily a crazy amount of money? I and a team I work with do websites for big companies, and that’s pretty much an entry level price.
BUT… for that you get a unique design with a well-thought-out architecture, cool technogimmicky bells and whistles, a content management system that makes it easy for people to add content but not to screw the site up, and someone like me to go through pages and pages of old product sheets and adapt them all, uniformly, to the website.
Webdiary clearly had nowhere near that level of sophistication, it could have used any number of off the shelf solutions costing at or near free. That it spent the kind of money I cost it crazy for what it got.
No one was saying it was a crazy amount of money for everything, Mike. In fact, they’ve all pretty much said what you said.
Posted by Andrea Harris, Administrator on 2005 12 08 at 09:42 AM • permalink*Sigh* $44K. I could have had one of these for that money.
And run the blog, and possibly employed the dolly bird as the bolding editor as well.
Posted by Pedro the Ignorant on 2005 12 08 at 10:00 AM • permalink#33: How much for just the motorcycle?
Andrea: the fact that webdiary has now taken its much-deserved place alongside the dodo, the great auk and the moa is all the evidence you need that Magog is incompetent to the bone, because if she had possessed any savy and real connections at all, there are any number of lefty foundations that would have weighed her down with sacks of gold.
Jayzus… I coulda made a feature motion picture for 44K. With wardrobe for the actresses.
This may have been a narrow escape. We may have just missed out on Margo becoming Australia’s Michael Moore.
As for the own savings. Not sure I believe it. Might of happened, if:
1. The woman really is that dumb
and/or
2. All of her admiring, ass-kissing acolytes were robbing her blind at every turn, like a crazy widow’s housekeepers…
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2005 12 08 at 11:33 AM • permalinkP.S. Of course, what you really get for $44,000+ in corporate America is our willingness to sit through five times as many meetings as it really needs with five times as many of your people. That might be a clue as to what happened at Webdiary, too; just imagine the endless, consensus-seeking, navel-gazing, self-congratulatory gasfests they must have held…
I feel a bit sorry for her if it was her own savings.
I don’t. Self-inflicted stupidity isn’t punished nearly enough these days, and perhaps this disaster will be a wake-up call to at least some marginal Webdiary readers.
Not to the truly committed, of course. (Pun not intended.) Just looking at all the people quoted in the first update, you just know these are the same types who think that a government program that isn’t working can be fixed simply by throwing more money at it. Hence, “$44,000 wasted on a pointless blog = huge success”. Hey, with that price tag it just HAS to be good!
And apropos the Hamish comment linked in Update II, why is Hamish addressing “John Henry Calvinist” as “Damian”? Don’t tell me there are even more people using fake-but-accurate “real names” on WD than just Harry Heidelberg and Polly Bush? Impossible!
All sarcasm aside, the idiotic “all comments must be pre-approved” attitude isn’t the only thing that’s wrong with their commenting policy; the requirement for real names is at least as stupid. It discourages marginal commenters, and the truly insistent won’t care anyway, and will just make up a real-sounding fake name. As a troll reduction measure, it’s certainly less than useless. But so typical of the Left’s style-over-substance attitude: Better to have twenty John Millers who post nothing of consequence, than twenty Grublarghs with lots of sensible comments.
PS: Ah, I see JH Calvinist indeed isn’t using his real name.
In fact, they’ve all pretty much said what you said.
Really? Can you point to a single one?
You know, MikeG, you can buy a lot of reading comprehension courses for $44000 too, even in Australian dollars.
Posted by Andrea Harris, Administrator on 2005 12 08 at 01:22 PM • permalinkCan you imagine what tax dollars are being spent on at NPR and PBS?
There’s some crackpot at the local PBS station up here in Seattle (the financial mismanagement of which would take far more explaining than I care to do at this time) who is campaigning for something he calls “take back your time day”. Basically what it amounts to is that he’s trying to convince us that everyone in America should be getting just as much vacation per year as people in European nations with their economies in the potty due to government handouts… Gives you a pretty good idea of who they’ll let onto the public payroll these days.
$44,000 would have bought an awful lot of Bartlweet.
Come to think of it - it did.Posted by SwinishCapitalist on 2005 12 08 at 05:07 PM • permalinkYou know, MikeG, you can buy a lot of reading comprehension courses for $44000 too, even in Australian dollars.
You know, Andrea, that was a snotty evasion, not an example. I don’t see that I did anything to deserve this extremely inappropriate rudeness from you—other than question your first, likewise far from polite, remark.
It’s tough running an online media empire from an internet cafe.
Posted by Lucky Nutsacks on 2005 12 08 at 06:29 PM • permalinkMike, stop being a wanker.
No-one suggested that $44,000 was too much to pay for the world’s bestest website. But Webdiary is a nothing-special Typepad blog, and Typepad’s top-of-the-line service costs $14.95 per month - about A$20. Since WD has been around in its present form for about four months, one might well wonder where the remaining $43,920 went.
If Margrok wanted to pay me $140,000 a year, even in Strine money, I’d run her blog for her, Hell, I’d even edit her copy so it looked like she could spell correctly.
I wonder if it ever crossed Margrok’s mind to try some of the shennanigans some bloggers (Mr. Daily Dish for example) have used to rake in the dough? From the sound of the valedictory comments there must be lots of gullible…um, caring , devoted lefties in Oz who would be happy to part with a bit of moola for Margrok’s sake. Or maybe it’s just a case of blog comments are cheap. On the other hand, we have learned from Web Diary that they are not cheap, but horribly expensive. Go figure.
Posted by Michael Lonie on 2005 12 08 at 06:36 PM • permalinkOf all the things to have posted to draw out the schoolyard bully mentality (and the invective to go with it). Perhaps Andrea feels I was high-hatting her as a competitor; I assure all the thought had never occurred to me. In any case, my fairly simple point was that that kind of money does get spent all the time—but you normally get a hell of a lot more for it, per the examples I gave. (As a freelancer who bids stuff all the time, I do NOT take it for granted that people’s ideas of what things should cost are anywhere close to what they actually do cost.)
Now, why any of that should have led the alley cats to draw claws and start hissing at me is completely beyond me. But then internet nastiness, like road rage, is usually about something other than its proximate cause.
I think it’s very sad. Not that the web site failed - I’m glad to see Leftists fail in the arena of ideas - but that this poor woman who, all jesting aside, clearly has been afflicted with mental problems which have already caused her to destroy a once-promising career. A self destruction which has taken place in the cold glare of the public spotlight, which in itself makes her deserving of pity no matter how much we hate her opinions. Then on top of it all, those whom she thinks are her friends are nothing but flattering parasites, feeding on what little wealth she has accumulated while they murmur ‘we love you Margo’.
Losing everything, even her mind, surrounded by false admirers, but without a true friend in the world. It’s too distasteful to be amusing, I’m afraid.
Well, we all knew Margo has no sense of capitalism at all.
But she must have made the big error of employing proof readers taught by the ‘whole word method’ -to about grade 4.
Next for Margo? To paraphrase Homer Simpson:
The ABC: “We love you Margo, and we want to work for us and pay you enormously above what you are worth.”
Margo: “I love you too, and I’m going to let you!”For the record, Homer soon bankrupted his long-lost capitalist brother when he got his job.
Now that Margo’s gone, the left have teared up and any day now will beatify her with the Blessed Red Star of Lenin Award or something. But when she was still around, they barely linked to or even mentioned her, and certainly spent bugger all time and effort assisting, supporting or even defending their demented fellow traveller. For all its claims to collectivism and solidarity, Australia’s left-wing blogosphere demonstrated just the opposite. Which is why it’s crying a collective river now, I suppose.
My prediction is that Mark Latham will approach Margo to assist in resuscitating his political career, and upon winning office will make her the treasurer.
I’m appalled that she spent so much money on a blog. My income is currently half of what she spent on the One Hundred and Eight Days of WebDairy, for a year, and even I can afford adsl. Can’t afford much else, but having unmoderated comments and tagging helps.
I think moderating (aka editing) the comments is patronising your audience anyway. If her audience are such abysmal grammarions, then surely there is no harm in allowing them to butcher the language however they see fit.
We might have gotten a few more laughs, even.
I’m also with Kip - it’s a cold world on the public stage, even if it is the enforced intimacy of the net.
Posted by Nilknarf Arbed on 2005 12 08 at 09:38 PM • permalinkHanyu - did you ever read her interview with Mark Latham? - the most unprofessional, gushing and lame-arse copy I have ever read… if anything it was the final nail in her journalistic coffin. If that makes it into her CV, and some dimwit gives her a job as a journalist as a result - well…. ahh who gives a shit???
$44,000 would keep Nicky and I in alcohol for five or six years.
Just to put the whole train wreck in proportion, you see.
—Nora
Posted by The Thin Man Returns on 2005 12 08 at 11:00 PM • permalinkTrue Caz, but where’s the alcohol?
;-)
—Nora
Posted by The Thin Man Returns on 2005 12 08 at 11:43 PM • permalinkMikeG thundereth from High Dudgeon:
I don’t see that I did anything to deserve this extremely inappropriate rudeness from you
Well, we have already pointed out that you have difficulties in comprehension (of more than reading it appears) so that is no surprise. Here, maybe if I use the small words:
You dropped a comment here that said, in short, that lots of websites cost a lot of money so we shouldn’t be going on about how much money $44000 was.
This was a non-sequitur as well as being beside the point, because
1) no one here said a word about how no website anywhere could possibly cost a lot of money; instead, what they said was “that’s a whole lot of money for something that doesn’t actually cost that much”—ie, a non-commercial website using a service that charges around $15-19 American dollars per month, and
2) No one was saying that $44000 was a lot of money in every and all circumstances, just in this particular instance.
And then you proceeded to briefly expound on the expenses of business websites as if everyone here was an economic idiot, and even more laughably you have lectured at length upon how rude people are being to you for not stopping and considering your unrelated asides with awe at your amazingly astute observations. And by the way, your “competitor” remarks are just bizarre. Just what “competition” are you talking about?
Posted by Andrea Harris, Administrator on 2005 12 09 at 12:41 AM • permalink#53:
Losing everything, even her mind, surrounded by false admirers, but without a true friend in the world.
Is Margo King Lear?
Posted by neWinSituation on 2005 12 09 at 12:43 AM • permalinkThere are lots of things I don’t understand. I know I will be mocked for it but I had immense admiration for Margo and what she was trying to do with Webdiary. I was hoping it would become a bit balanced.
That was not to be. Instead it went the other way.
I tried to help Margo a lot when she went independent. The Typepad site you see today is one I built. I know, big deal, who can’t do a Typepad site in 5 minutes? They have done the usual tinkering with pictures and links that all bloggers do.
They always lost sight of what they were doing. Of course you can call it a “community” or whatever. It can be all those things but it needs no more functionality than a well designed multi-author blog.
They were never seeking to do what is done here.
That moderation / comments policy drove me wild. The whole thing is so idiotic and yet the more idiotic it became the more defensive they have become about it.
It was ill conceived from the start but trying to organize lefties is like trying to heard cats.
Margo could easily have built a high readership multi-author blog that had all the characteristics she wanted.
But no. It was not to be because a bunch of activists got on board and derailed any attempts at common sense. That is why we now have a train wreck. Surprise, surprise.
The only thing conspiring against the left is their own stupidity.
Why I tried to help I will never know. Of course now I am the worst in the world.
Posted by Harry Heidelberg on 2005 12 09 at 01:36 AM • permalinkLooks like idiots will never learn:
To the 20+ people who have mailed or transferred nearly $3000 to us in the last 48 hours, profuse (and humbled) thanks.
What do you do if you’ve just wasted all your money? Waste some more.
Posted by Evil Pundit on 2005 12 09 at 06:31 AM • permalinkHarry, helping someone out is a good thing. The only problem is that sometimes those who need help are often the ones who don’t appreciate it.
From what I can see from over here in my corner of the ether, Margo had herself a few too many sycophants. Hangers-on are not friends. They bleed you dry, and I reckon this is what they did with her.
If they were taking money from her to do a bit of tinkering on a blog, they need to be taken out and strung up.
I don’t feel bad about the caning she’s taken over the years from Tim and everyone else - we’re all in the open (relatively) - and if it was that hard for her to deal with then she would have gotten out of it way back.
It’s the way her ‘friends’ have taken advantage of her obvious naivete and gullibility.
A lot of the time, our friends tell us things we don’t want to hear. In her case, she was listening to the wrong people, and she’s come a cropper.
Now it’s up to her to see if she can get her shite together.
Personally, I doubt it.
Posted by Nilknarf Arbed on 2005 12 09 at 06:32 AM • permalinkThis keeps getting better. Now they’ve added a title above the swamp hag’s portrait stating that “Webdiary was created by, and is still inspired by, Margo Kingston”.
Reminds me of North Korea and their continued infatuation with “Great Leader” Kim Il Sung, even though the bastard’s been dead ten years.
Posted by HisHineness on 2005 12 09 at 08:26 AM • permalinkI think a significant part of the $44,000 must have gone into the airbrushing job on the photo of Dear Leader. I’ve never seen such gratuitous use of the Blur Tool.
Posted by Evil Pundit on 2005 12 09 at 10:29 AM • permalinkIt’s a peculiar insult game the comment junkies at TimBlair.net enjoy playing.
Actually, it’s just that many of us don’t suffer fools lightly, no matter their ideological bent. Gee, wonder why you’ve been on the receiving end yourself more than a few times.
And now, go cry a river elsewhere, kip. Maybe some place where True Conservatives congregate.
Well, peoples I would say that the right are as obscene as your beloved PM. Webdiary is the only forum worth looking at as it sifts through the mountain of hubris coming out of the government, and exposed it for the bullshit it is. Funny, tell it like it is, get told off as a looney; live in a smokescreen, be declared right. Welcome to neo-conservatism! get in, sit down, shut up.
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Oh. My. Gawd. I wish I earning that sorta cash.
I darn well wouldn’t spend it on my blog, that’s for sure.