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Shiny Happy People
StumbleUponNMK talks to Ashley Norris, founder and director of Shiny Media, about the company's £4.5mn VC investment, and what it means for Europe's biggest blog network.
NMK talks to Ashley Norris, founder and director of Shiny Media, about the company's £4.5mn VC investment, and what it means for Europe's biggest blog network.
On Sunday 28 January, Shiny Media announced that it had received £4.5mn in investment from Bright Station Ventures, a newly formed venture fund headed by entrepreneur Dan Wagner. The investment comes in return for a 50 per cent equity stake according to some reports. Shiny is a London blog network formed in August 2003 which includes blogs such as Shiny Shiny and Tech Digest among its 26 titles.
NMK: Congratulations on the funding. Is this a victory for bloggers?
Ashley Norris: Really, the victory happened about a year ago. That was when the mainstream media started to really sit up and take notice of what we bloggers were up to, and started to emulate it.
I guess it's a victory for the things which make blogs special, some of the features of the form. The permalinks to entries, trackbacks to other blogs and the comments. It's also the tone - the notion that we're not handing down wisdom from on high. It's far more of a conversation with people who are like you.
NMK: Having created a large blog network on a shoestring, why do you need such a large level of funding?
Norris: While our heritage is in the blogosphere, going forwards we'll be competing with mainstream media. The Haymarkets and Future Publishings of this world have already started to create blogs. They are incredibly well-resourced compared to the average blog and we'll need equivalent resources to be able to compete with them for advertising. We've already attracted more advertising from blue chip companies than many mainstream sites and we want to take that to new levels.
At the same time we're ambitious about doing new things. We view ourselves as a new media company rather than a group of blogs. For one thing, we're really keen to develop our video offerings. Some of our videos have been viewed millions of times on YouTube. And obviously, video requires a bit more money than writing does.
We're also keenly eyeing the mobile space. It's our belief that the YouTube of mobile is equally likely to come from Europe as the US. It will give us the flexibility to contend in that space. On the other hand, we may actually end up doing mainstream projects as well, since we've got the skill set to accomplish that.
Ultimately, the funding allows us to grow up as a company; to move beyond the startup mentality.
NMK: One criticism that was made of YouTube was that it was digital sharecropping: that it was using its contributors' unpaid talent to create its value. To play devil's advocate, could a similar accusation be levelled at Shiny?
Norris: No, I wouldn't say that we were digital sharecropping. The founders of the company, myself, Katie Lee and Chris Price, gave up fairly lucrative freelance careers to work at Shiny. We've worked very hard to establish the credibility of our blogs and there's no easy way to do that. A good blog has to be dynamic and up-to-date with lots of new content all the time: that demands a lot of commitment.
To be honest, in the last two years, I've only seen two
blogs that have gone from zero to success in a very short time.
One of those is Pete Cashmore's Mashable - he's achieved
success by choosing the right topic at the right time and then
working at it very hard. The other one was our own World Cup
blog Who Ate All the Bratwurst, and that was very clearly a case
of being in the right place at the right time. It went from zero
to 150,000 readers very quickly and then it all trailed off, as
you might expect. So I guess what I'm saying is that
it's involved a very big investment of time and effort, and
unless you're really lucky, there's no magic
formula.
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