Dan Lyons of Fake Steve Jobs fame is a columnist at Newsweek. His latest piece suggests that blogs are not business opportunities and that turning a blog into a business is a pipe dream (I’m paraphrasing).
He thinks this mostly because he failed to turn a significant traffic spike on his own blog into significant profits. Of course, those who know the social media business know that there is, in fact, a real opportunity to turn social media sites into real businesses. More importantly, they know that it’s not easy.
Here’s the comment I left over at Newsweek:

With blogs, like with any media product, there are at least two sides to the equation. There is the creative/editorial side, which is concerned with creating content, and there is the business/publishing side, which is concerned with leveraging that content to produce profits.
I think the vast majority of observers fail to recognize just how complicated both sides of this equation are. Creating great content that attracts a loyal community is hard work that depends on a special kind of creative person. Trust me, successful bloggers are invariably professionals that take their jobs very seriously and work as hard as anyone. In this sense, the vision of the guy in his pajamas was never reality.
But maybe even less understood is the business side. Turning social media into a profit-making business depends not only on great content and engaged communities (which are absolutely necessary) but also on deep knowledge and relationships across the advertising industry, the technical expertise to make integrated advertising campaigns happen, the business acumen to know which tech solutions to partner with and how, reciprocal and productive relationships with brands and ad agencies, not to mention all of the other activities and departments that make businesses happen – finance, HR, marketing, etc.
Successful blogs are in reality niche publishing businesses that are every bit as sophisticated as any digital publishing company.