The Independent Blogger's Fate: An Economic Perspective

There is a pattern in modern economic life which is well-established in the historical record. Specifically a new sector emerges, which is initially a comparatively open field, into which many contenders enter--but fierce, and never remotely equal, with economies of scale paying off, competition thins out the field fast. Many get driven out of business altogether, some get swallowed up entirely by bigger operations on some terms or other, others continue to operate as apparent brand names in their own right but as a practical matter dependents of those bigger and more successful operators, as the scene turns into an oligopoly, if not a monopoly. Those big players strongly established, with the expansion of the winners and the increasing sophistication of the game having raised the amount of capital anyone needs to make a plausible entry into the field to immense proportions and the venture exceedingly risky, few are ready to try and fewer still of those who do so get anywhere, with the result that the rhetoric of "entrepreneurship" and "small business" and "startup" rings very hollow to anyone with an eye to facts rather than the pieties of orthodoxy--and indeed those who hope to build a small business into a big one prone to try their luck elsewhere, as the giants of the field find themselves in so secure a position that John Kenneth Galbraith wrote of them as, unlike their small business counterparts, having moved out of the "market system" into a "planning system."

So did it go in such areas as automobiles, where there were over two thousand producers before the ascent to dominance of the "Big Three" (since which time the field has consolidated even more thoroughly), and aerospace, where the fewness of the high-end producers today is underscored every time a big defense contract is to be handed out (a whole two choices!). So has it gone in the computing field, where before Microsoft, Google, Facebook we had rather a larger number of contenders in the areas of operating system, search engine, social media platform. If less obviously, so is it also going with the creation of online content, at least to the extent that such content is expected to have any traction in the "attention economy." Independent bloggers may go on writing, but they get read less and less as the market is instead more and more dominated by big platforms--and launching your own blog today on your own, unsupported, in the hope that it will one day grow big, makes about as much sense as trying to launch your own operating system or social media platform in today's market.

This is most certainly not the web promised by the cyber-utopians. But it is most certainly the web that those familiar with economic history ought to have expected, the one we all too predictably got, and the one with which we are constrained to cope, for better or worse.