Peter Rojas founded both of the Internet’s most successful gadget blogs.
By Michael A. Banks
The following is an excerpt from Blogging Heroes (Wiley, 2007).
The book features interviews with well-known bloggers.
As cofounder and editorial director of Engadget, Peter Rojas is responsible for keeping millions of blog readers up-to-date on the latest in consumer electronics, personal technology, and gadgets in general.
Rojas, who is a graduate of Harvard and the University of Sussex (UK), has an extensive background in print journalism. He’s also the chief strategy officer for Weblogs, Inc. As a result of AOL buying Engadget and the rest of Weblogs in 2006, he’s also a programming director with AOL.
As a freelance writer in 2001, he started a personal blog, in part as a public notebook for article ideas. Two years later he founded Gizmodo (www.gizmodo.com), a weblog that focuses on the latest in technology. In 2004, Rojas created Engadget as a move toward his vision of what a dedicated team of bloggers can accomplish. In the interview that follows, he relates some of his personal experiences.
Michael Banks: What inspired you to start your first blog?
Peter Rojas: I started the blog just after I was laid off from my job at Red Herring magazine, where I was a technology journalist and editor. Forty other people lost their jobs the same day as I did. The technology industry had sort of melted down in California.
I had a good friend who was an editor at Wired. He was sort of playing around with blogs, and he suggested that I start a blog. “Here’s your chance to get your writing — and your voice — out there,” he said, “and at the very least, you’ll be writing and coming up with ideas for stories that you can pitch.”
And so that’s originally what my blog was — sort of a public notebook of ideas for stories that I wanted to pitch to magazines. I never was very good at the personal blog. I didn’t write for it very often. Because I was freelancing, I spent a lot of time writing pitches for magazines and newspapers, which cut into my blogging time.
MB: You weren’t in it to make money?
PR: When I started blogging with my personal blog, it was definitely not to make money. I got into it very early, when it wasn’t clear that there was any money in blogging. The idea that someone would advertise on a blog seemed kind of absurd. It was just unknowable.
And the idea that advertisers would want to associate themselves with something so loose, free form, and chaotic — the consensus was, “People will never advertise on blogs, at least not on a large scale. You will never get big advertisers, because they won’t trust it, they won’t want to be associated with that kind of stuff.” But people came around. When you have seven or eight million readers, it’s kind of hard to wonder where your audience is.
And blogging grew up a little bit. People started to trust it. They realized that just because it’s free form doesn’t mean that there aren’t sites that are more trustworthy, have better reputations, and have better concepts than others. As the medium grew up, people started to see the nuances, and it became less black-and-white and more gray. And that’s when it really started to come into its own and became something that one can do professionally.
When I started Gizmodo in 2002, it wasn’t something I thought would ever really make money. I thought it would take off, but I never thought it would become as big as it did. But I was better able to work at it professionally and focus on it very intently.
MB: When did blog advertising really get going?
PR: It really was 2004. Google AdSense had a lot to do with it. Around the tail end of 2004, we started to see serious advertisers.
MB: How did you go from Gizmodo to Engadget?
PR: Well, I wasn’t actually happy with the situation I had at Gizmodo. Nick’s [Nick Denton, founder and proprietor of Gawker Media, which owns Gizmodo] vision was for more of a casual site that would be done by one editor, part-time. At the time, this was the dominant mode of blogging.
I saw greater potential in blogging. I knew that if this was my full-time job, and I had other people working with me, I could do much more. I decided to take the chance and partner with Weblogs, Inc. We really took off from there.
MB: You have an extensive background in print media. Can you contrast blogging with editing or writing for a print magazine?
PR: Blogging is a very differently structured media, in the same way that episodic television is very different from a film. Blogging is something that you do in real time — it’s very fast, and it’s much more intimate and conversational. A magazine has a slower editorial pace — a weekly is a little more hectic. And you can’t update things in real time.
With a magazine, each week you have a certain number of boxes you have to fill, depending on how many pages you have, depending on how much advertising you have. Stories have to fit certain formats and have certain links, and there has to be a distribution of certain kinds of stories.
At Engadget, we don’t have to worry about that. We do what needs to be done. We usually make between 30 and 50 posts a day, but if there really wasn’t anything to write about, we would do tech posts. I don’t really see that happening any time soon, given how intense the consumer electronics field is. I would love it if it slowed down to just 10 posts a day. But we do what makes sense.
We don’t have any sort of a target, and we don’t have quotas. For example, the weekend after the iPhone release, we went overboard with the iPhone coverage because we have unlimited space. We could be as comprehensive as a 10,000-word review of the iPhone, and as casual as a photo of an iPhone with a Newton. Audiences really respond to that. And that’s what’s great about blogging and all niche media — you can really go in-depth. You go deep, not wide.
MB: Is there more room to be personal in blogging?
PR: Absolutely. When I started, Engadget wasn’t about me, but it was my sort of perspective as an enthusiast. We are the audience that we’re writing for. And I think that’s sort of the critical difference between magazines and blogs. I come from a journalism background, and when I was at Red Herring, we weren’t the audience. We were journalists who were never going to be venture capitalists.
So there was always this sort of idea that we were really different and set apart and that we were these arbiters. And with Engadget, it’s like we’re the audience, and our job is to be honest with the audience. Why would we lie to ourselves?
And this was a thing that I found very liberating about blogging. I am not an engineer, and I’m not a programmer. A lot of the technology sites before I started Gizmodo were very hard-core. On the other hand, you had these CNET [and] New York Times “circuit” sections that were very broad market, for people who were just looking for information about what to buy. They weren’t necessarily that interested in the market itself.
What I realized was that there was a market for people like me who are just really passionate about this stuff and want to be able to follow it. Engadget’s not a good place to just drop in on once every six months because you want to buy something. It’s a place to go because you’re interested in following the gadget world, just like some people follow the sports world.
MB: What do you do to bring in readers? Does Weblogs, Inc. or someone involved with Engadget work on search engine optimization (SEO)?
PR: No. We don’t do any SEO. I don’t believe in SEO.
The blog world is very meritocratic. If you don’t have consistently good posts, your blog is not going to go very far. There are tricks you can do to get some traffic here and there, but by and large, the cream rises to the top. The most successful blogs are generally the ones with the best writing, run by people with the most hustle.
You can see someone come out of nowhere and become a huge force in the industry. I was nobody, right? And now I’m a big voice in this world. And Mike Arrington [of TechCrunch]? I never even heard of this guy when I worked for Red Herring and covered venture capital in Silicon Valley. And he’s been successful because his site is good. He works really hard.
You know, people talk about the A-list this, and the B-list that, and to be honest, it’s a very fluid world. The people that work really hard and produce good work are successful, by and large.
MB: You keep an eye on other blogs, then?
PR: At Engadget, we have a collaborative newsreader with about 700 sites. I personally read about 200 a day. I add some sites, and I delete some, but I’m still saturated. It’s like having a second job, just keeping up with everything! It’s worse than email. People talk about email bankruptcy? I’m on top of my email. I don’t have a backlog of email to answer. It’s the RSS feeds that overwhelm me. There’s so much going on. It’s exciting.
When I decide I want to learn something about a field or an area, Ijust subscribe to blogs in that area, sometimes at random. For example, about a year ago I decided to learn about widgets. I literally Googled “widgets blog” and found a bunch of blogs. As I read and linked to more blogs, it became obvious what the best blogs in that field were.
MB: Aside from time management, what is the most difficult part of blogging for you?
PR: You have to get used to the fact that people are going to be very, very critical. Grow a thick skin and be prepared to accept legitimate criticism. When you’re a very popular blogger, you have to be prepared to be treated as a public figure.
You also have to learn to chill out a little bit, and not take everything personally. People are jerks, and people are going to shoot their mouths off and say awful things. I’ve gotten death threats. You just have to realize that it’s not the end of the world when someone emails you and says they’re going to chop your head off. You have to be prepared to deal with a lot of that stuff — blogging can be a contact sport.
Another thing about blogging is that it is very, very competitive, and you have to constantly raise your game. And I think at Engadget, we’ve done a really great job of constantly raising our game, of consciously pushing ourselves to do better. We’ve never gotten complacent. We’ve never sort of leaned back and said, “Well, you know what? We’re number one, and now we can sort of drift and hang out.” We owe it to ourselves and [our] readers to constantly be doing a better job.
MB: What do you find gratifying as a blogger?
PR: One of the things I really love about blogging is that I’ve always been able to write up for the audience. I made this decision that the audience was very smart and wanted a lot of very in-depth, very thorough coverage. They didn’t want just a cursory overview of things or watered-down coverage.
There are so many amazing things. Like the reader meetups we hosted, having 500 people show up for an event. Going outside and seeing the line stretched around the block. Honestly, that blew me away.
In some ways, blogging still feels like just this goofy thing that I do in my apartment. We don’t have an office, so it’s sometimes hard to get my head around the fact that this is something that millions of people read — millions of people love Engadget.
Things like interviewing Bill Gates are also good. But I think covering CES [the Consumer Electronics Show] in 2007 was one of my proudest moments, because I feel like I’ve really been able to transform the show.
When I started covering CES, it was a big show, but there was not a lot of awareness of it on the consumer level. But I think we’ve really helped turn CES into a really big event — some thing that not just the attendees care about, but something the rest of the world should pay attention to as well. I think we have, hands-down, the best coverage of CES that’s ever been done anywhere by anyone.
MB: As you read other blogs, do you get some feeling for the gestalt of the overall blogosphere?
PR: You know, there isn’t one. It’s so big, and so much stuff is going on now that I find it hard to make sense of anything but the little corner that I’m a part of. I know other tech bloggers — like Dave Winer, Robert Scoble, Kevin Rose, and Steve Rubel — and this is kind of my little corner of the business.
But there are other universes out there where those names mean nothing. And I think that’s actually good. I don’t really know any of the people in the political blogosphere, of which there are many smaller political blogospheres. There is a celebrity gossip blogosphere, and many others. I have my little perspective on things and where things are going in my sphere, and I focus on that.
MB: Any advice for somebody who’s starting a blog?
PR: My number-one piece of advice is [to] find something to be passionate about. I know that sounds really obvious, but it is not obvious in some ways to a lot of people. And a lot of people think, “Oh well, I want to have a successful blog, so I should do a blog about something that’s already successful.” Like doing a blog about gossip because that seems to do really well.
But the thing about it is that what makes a blog really successful is the passion of the person or the people who are writing it. If you have that passion and you’re blogging about something, it will be very, very obvious. The readers will pick up on that, and you will have a successful blog.
Another piece of advice is don’t be afraid to start slowly. I wouldn’t necessarily try to attract too much attention too quickly, because when you start blogging, you’re going to make mistakes. You’re going to do something that someone is not happy with. You might not link to someone properly or whatever. There’s sort of a blog etiquette that you have to figure out.
You want to sort of give yourself a chance to acclimate to the pace and the writing style, to find your voice. And that can take a little while. It took me about six months at Gizmodo to find my voice. And really enjoy that time, because once you have an audience you cannot ever go back to posting anonymously. So don’t necessarily feel pressured to have a successful blog right away. You’re going to be doing stuff that’s going to make your blog worse, like trying to write stories just to get on Digg or just to get a link from Engadget.
And that is really, ultimately what doesn’t make it. There are blogs with everything like top ten this or top five that, and those blogs get traffic just because people link to them from Digg, Technorati, or a similar site. But they’re not going to have an organic readership. No one actually thinks, “Oh, I love this blog!” It’s more like this is a site that gets linked to on Digg every week.
That’s not the kind of site you want to have. You want to have the kind of site where people say, “I am a part of this community. I am a passionate reader of this site. This site gives me something that I love, and I have to read it every day.”
It’s all about finding a subject. When I started Gizmodo and Engadget, gadgets seemed like such a narrow niche. I was thinking, “OK, I’m not going to do a technology blog. I’m going to do a something-of-value gadget blog. It’s going to be so narrow.”
But gadgets turned out to be this huge category. If I was going to start a blog now, I would go very, very, very niche — as niche as you can get.
The thing about it is, no matter how niche you go, there will always be too much to write about. But if you pick something specific and maybe that’s not so heavily covered yet, you have a chance to really establish yourself as a voice in that area.
Enthusiasm makes a huge, huge difference. And readers can tell. When I read a blog, I can tell when someone really cares about the subject matter. And if you think about it, when you really care, you actually start to ask the kinds of questions and do the kind of writing that creates something of value for the reader. There’s a difference between being an Apple fanboy and someone who really cares about the products they’re buying from Apple. For example, the Apple blogs that I read that have a lot of value — the people say, “I care so much about this stuff that I am not going to shy away from criticism, or shy away from saying what I really feel, or being honest when I think Apple screwed up.”
It’s the people who love Apple — who actually care enough about it to say what they really feel and to criticize — who are doing a great job. And that’s the thing about Engadget that people like — I am not afraid to call it as I see it, to really level with the audience.
Finally, remember that the blogging entry barrier is so low that your credibility is the only thing you have to differentiate yourself from everyone else.
For example, I worked at Red Herring but wasn’t necessarily that interested in venture capital. I was just happy to have a job and work in a magazine and get paid. But I wasn’t really that interested in the subject. And so I ended up trying to write stories that I was interested in. They were about technology, but they didn’t necessarily fit in with what Red Herring was about. They wouldn’t let me do a story about Napster, and I told them, “This is going to be a huge thing!” But they said, “There is no business model.”
MICHAEL A. BANKS has written more than forty books, and chronicled online activities for a variety of magazines including PC World and PC Magazine. An enthusiastic blogger, Banks has participated in online communities for more than a quarter-century.
