What? £80,000?

Other bloggers have been tearing this blogpost to shreds. Its essentially a business plan for how to do a collectivist Left-wing Local blog.

What sticks out for me most of all is this paragraph on costs:-

My initial workings suggest that a local blog covering a population of 30-40,000 people might be able to survive on turnover of around £80,000 per year inclusive of a living wage for two staff and operational costs, but exclusive of delivery costs (see below) which will need to remain volunteer based in the short term.

Its frankly insane.

Blogging platforms are pretty much free. Blogger, wordpress, Livejournal, even Facebook groups/notes. Sure, you can spend money on a TypePad blog and hosting on your own server somewhere, but its not really necessary, its a vanity thing like getting 7 inches pressed.

And whilst a living wage for blogging alone would be nice, it does suggest that you'll be employing people who don't really want to write blogposts.

Me, I work for little over minimum wage, in London, making sandwiches. The blogging I do for free, because I want to.

The author of the post does go on to cover where the money comes from. Not specifically from the website itself, but

...in the longer term these costs should as far as possible be covered by worker organisations like trade unions (and thereafter a Labour party more open to wider left engagement), the reality is that funds may need to be raised from charitable/employment creation sources (see, for example, this kind of opportunity coming along in Wales), and from very local advertising.

Lets turn this into a bullet-pointed list:-

• Local blog
• Trade Union blog
• Labour party blog
  
• Charity blog
• Employment creation sources (no idea what this means)
• Local advertising

Such a list makes me squint at the screen in confusion and despair. Why would anyone want to read such a thing. Why would a trade union paying for such a thing be in the interests of its members, or a charity for that matter? And just what are employment creation sources?

I like knitting, its a fun diversion, I'm not very good at it, but the end results are pretty neat. I'm currently working on a scarf, its taking me ages. About six weeks so far, not every day mind, but a few hours here and there. One day it'll be finished and I can give it to a loved one as a gift. Someone suggested I could sell it, I could have some kind of knitting business.

This is insane. It takes about fifty hours for me to knit a scarf. At minimum wage that would be about £300. Three hundred quid for a scarf of slightly lower quality that TK Maxx.

There's no way anyone would ever buy from my scarf knitting business, it would never be able to pay its worker.

Likewise, a blog that costs £80,000 would never work.

Okay, maybe it would, such things have happened in the past, sometimes overnight. Very rarely, but sometimes.

But if that's your businessplan, its insane.