Editor’s note (April 2026): This article is part of the Blog Herald’s editorial archives. Originally published in September 2005, it has been revised and updated to ensure accuracy and relevance for today’s readers.
In 2005, something happened in the blogosphere that felt like the first rumble of a media earthquake.
Blog networks—coordinated collections of owned and operated blogs operating under a single brand—were proliferating rapidly. So fast that Blog Herald created a list of 36 blog networks in September, which has grown significantly in just a few months.
The list included names like Gawker Media, Weblogs Inc., b5media, Corante and Creative Weblogging – dozens of small, regional and language-specific networks covering Italian, German, Dutch, Spanish, Russian and Indonesian publishers.
It was a moment that promised a new architecture for independent media. It didn’t happen at all. But the story of what these networks are trying to do, and why most of them fail or are adopted, is now more instructive than ever.
Which blog networks were actually trying to build
In 2005, the logic behind blogging networks was sound. Solo bloggers were gaining an audience, but they had no infrastructure: no advertising sales teams, no editorial support, no shared hosting, no brand identity other than their name. All this was solved by a network. Writers received a platform and revenue share; network acquired content and traffic; advertisers got scale.
Weblogs Inc. founded by Jason Calacanis. was the gold standard. He launched vertical blogs covering technology, gaming, food and celebrity coverage, eventually reporting to AOL. 25 million dollars in 2005 — a list of 36 networks was compiled that year. Gawker Media, Nick Denton’s operation, took a different and sharper editorial line, building a stable of properties like Gizmodo, Kotaku and Lifehacker that would define the voice of online media for a decade.
These were not hobbyist blogs with ambitions. They were the early prototypes of what we now call digital media companies.
A structural problem that no one wants to talk about
For all speed, most of the 36 networks on the 2005 list have disappeared. It’s not just quieter – it’s gone. The reasons vary by network, but a few patterns repeat themselves.
First, the economy was fragile. Display advertising was the primary revenue model and CPMs for blog content were always lower than premium editorial. As programmatic advertising matured and Google tightened its grip on the ad stack, the margin that kept the networks alive has largely evaporated.
Second, platform addiction has been fatal for many. Networks that built their distribution on early RSS aggregator, MSN, or Yahoo partnerships found themselves exposed when those relationships changed. Traffic that appeared to be owned was often borrowed. It’s a lesson the creative economy still learns — painfully — every time an algorithm update reshuffles the deck.
Third, the talent model was difficult to maintain. Writers who build a real audience often outgrow the network model and become independent. Networks that rely on low-paying, high-volume contributors have found that quality degrades over time, making it difficult to justify ongoing ad spending.
What survived and why it matters
The properties that continued from that era weren’t necessarily the ones with the most networks or the most blogs. They were the ones with real editorial personality and, most importantly, direct audience relations.
The legacy of Gawker Media resides in several of his former properties, now under different ownership. SB Nation, which appeared in that list as “SBNation” in 2005, became Vox Media, one of the more enduring digital publishing groups to emerge from the blog age. Listed as a financial blog network, Seeking Alpha is still active today, finding a lasting niche among retail investors and market analysts. These survivors established something that others did not: a reason to return was not just about novelty or volume.
The example is worth paying attention to. It wasn’t technical infrastructure or funding that distinguished the survivors—it was editorial consistency. They knew what they were standing for, and that gave them something to protect when monetization models changed.
The creative economy lives on this historical loop
Today’s landscape of newsletters, podcast networks, YouTube channels, and Substack publications is structurally different from the blog networks of 2005—but the underlying tensions are familiar. The question of whether to be independent or join a platform or collective is one that content creators still navigate on a daily basis. The promise of infrastructure, distribution, and monetization in exchange for content, whether it’s a podcast network, media collective, or creative fund, is still a bargain.
What is changing is risk awareness. Creators following the platform after it rebuilt its monetization — YouTube, Patreon, Medium, Twitter — have a tougher skepticism that the bloggers of 2005 largely lacked. Bloggers who joined networks in 2005 often did so with genuine optimism about what those networks would become. Those who later regretted it usually made a structural mistake: they built on someone else’s foundation without first securing their own audience.
A lesson that never gets old
Looking at the list of 36 blog networks representing publishers in at least six languages, from Indonesia to Germany to Russia, it’s not an impressive ambition. How quickly a landscape that seemed so solid became unrecognizable.
The most enduring advice of that era is also the most boring: own your list, own your domain, own your relationship with your readers. Networks can amplify this. They cannot replace him. Every generation of bloggers learns this the hard way, and there’s no reason to think the current generation will be any different—unless creators go in with open eyes to what they trade and store.
The blogosphere of 2005 was electric, and that energy was no mistake. The networks that came and went in that period were not a failure of ambition. They were mostly structural failures – and that’s the part worth studying.
