Group blog covering blogging news and business, including TechCrunch, Mashable, WordPress, Twitter monetization, and podcast interviews with blog figures.
HN commenters link it for blogging-industry history, such as a podcast on Duncan Riley leaving TechCrunch and a post on Posterous and Tumblr.
I hate sourging for sources, and it seems obvious enough, but fair point. This is from a quick google.
I'll talk regarding the Asian market, which is far from saturated (this I'm not going to go compile more research on, so challenge me if you will)
http://www.blogherald.com/2005/05/25/world-wide-blog-count-for-may-now-over-60-million-blogs/
Old, but if this is good, 15M blogs in South Korea is quite a large market.
http://blog.mozilla.com/gen/2007/06/27/yahoo-japan-more-page-views-than-yahoo-us/
Recent, but here again I will go uncited: Yahoo dies against Google in USA, but in Asia they have been king. Yahoo is plenty real, and Asia matters to them, a lot.
You might be fine with the North American market. It's hella big. But if you have an entry point into Asia and don't use it, that's wasted potential, because cloning works on an international scale.
http://mashable.com/2007/08/19/doktus/
What's so real about the internet is that it's zero distance from anywhere around the globe, and only a relatively small number of companies exploit this fully. If more companies did, Mark Cuban wouldn't be complaining about it being boring today.
You can still hear the podcast he made when he left here: http://www.blogherald.com/2008/05/05/podcast-20082-an-exclusive-interview-with-duncan-riley-on-his-exit-from-techcrunch/
As I recall he left under favorable terms but the relationship between him and Arrington quickly degraded (You can read Gawker's skewed to the negative account of things here: http://gawker.com/5019358/%7CcommentLink%7C)
The irony is Duncan Riley and Marshall Kirkpatrick remain the best proof that the TechCrunch authors and Arrington could move on to a new site and probably do quite well.
The irony
> people don't get undeserved hate
That is obviously not true. Racism, homophobia, bigotry are every-day examples of undeserved hate.
Regarding the rest of your hypothesis - that when the brand is represented by a single person, the hate gets concentrated on that single person - it seems plausible.
I was going to make the argument that some types of "personal brands" seem to get more harassment than others, but then I found this piece about Mike Arrington (a white guy): http://www.blogherald.com/2009/01/28/michael-arrington-takes-a-break-after-death-threat-and-spit-attack/
I remember MySpace ended up blocking YouTube from their site. And YouTube, a small startup at the time, turned to their users to plead to MySpace to activate them again. A few weeks later, they were back in business. But it's interesting to know how close YouTube was to hitting the deadpool.
Edit: Dug up an older article about it: http://www.blogherald.com/2005/12/22/myspace-users-angry-over-news-corp-censorship-of-youtube/
http://www.blogherald.com/2008/08/25/the-most-aggressive-copyright-holders/
http://www.cpaglobal.com/newlegalreview/4909/marketers_warned_don_t_play_ga
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_symbols
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2012/apr/13/olympics-2012-branding-police-sponsors
Could this have anything to do with Posterous' risqué post claiming superiority over Tumblr?
http://www.blogherald.com/2010/06/24/posterous-slanders-tumblr/