Toronto blog network gets rid of bloggers to save itself

Setting out to build the world’s third-biggest blog network sounds like a very Toronto thing to do, but b5media was left playing catch-up from the start — with a model that involved launching many dozens of websites covering niche topics, including celebrity gossip. Rick Segal, then a Toronto venture capitalist, outlined his motivation for helping back the company in October 2006: “It is not, in my view, about the act of blogging,” he wrote. “What is different today are the habits of a generation coming right up my proverbial tailpipe. They share a passion for information, the sharing of information, and most importantly the critical examination of information as a community.” Sounds great, where does a blogger sign up? There were plenty of takers of the offer to casually post blurbs on a blog that looked slick enough to pass for professional, in exchange for a hundred or two bucks a month, plus traffic bonuses — Jeremy Wright, then-CEO of the operation, boasted to The New York Times in June 2007 that the blogger behind Lohan Groupie was clearing six figures due to her duties beyond uploading last night’s paparazzi pics of Lindsay. But there were plenty of duds, too, resulting in cutbacks and the move to group the remaining sites into portal pages. Last spring, with the departure of executives and pay cuts across the board, Wright claimed b5 still had enough capital to survive “well into next year.” Then he was a goner, too, but the network remained — and now, all of a sudden, b5media is being portrayed as a player on the Manhattan media scene.

Turns out the new b5media boss, Elaine Kunda, turned to Elizabeth Spiers, the founding editor of Gawker, to shape their strategy into something more sophisticated than rubes eager to blog for $5 a day. The Gloss, launched this week, joins Crushable as initial examples of how they hope to salvage this thing — by providing workplace distraction for female administrative assistants across America, with a tone determinedly less intense than Gawker Media’s Jezebel. These sites are staffed similarly to all the magazines sold at supermarket checkouts: an NYC-based distillation of flyover country tastes. Which is, you know, savvier than tech startup types in Toronto feeding off the whims of wannabe content providers — a predatory approach that now drives nickel-and-dime content hosted by companies relying on search engine serendipity, like Demand Media and Examiner.com. But the transformation of b5media hasn’t gone without a hitch: somewhere between 50 and 150 contributors were unceremoniously dumped with no advance warning — not that their contracts required it — and, for some, washing out three years of efforts to climb a slippery slope. Also no longer part of the network is the site run by a b5media co-founder whose affiliation provided a sense that drag-and-drop dreams could come true: Problogger.