I just spotted a message posted by Steve Rubel on Twitter where he was pointing to a fresh post on the Broadstuff blog titled Here’s another profession that might disappear in which Alan Patrick proclaims that the end is in sight when it comes to all those A-List tech bloggers out there.

As Alan puts it in his post

And the issue at the core is simple - the only reason there are c 10 or so “A List, cover most everything in tech” blogs is because by and large they are using offset economics, ie they are publishing at under a sustainable economic cost. However, that means there is just a glut of people covering the same small set of stories to the same small, geeky audience - i.e. there is oversupply, and that means consolidation - there are very few commodity industries where more than 3 majors can make a living. So one thing is for sure, in a few years there will be far less of them.

The argument being that there will come a point when all these big name blogs will come to resemble the mainstream media that they were originally an alternative to.

That might possible be true to the extent that blogs like TechCrunch, Engadget and GigaOM will at some point cross the boundary from being one of those cute things called a blog into being like mainstream media outlets - if they don’t get bought up first. However the A-List really has nothing to do with any individual big name blog or the people running them.

The A-List is a metric by which blog popularity is measured. For every blogs that falls off of the A-List there will be one to replace it. The A-list is blog agnostic - it doesn’t care who is doing the writing - it only cares about how many people are reading and in turn how many are trading those links back and forth.

There are blogs in the B-List or even the C-List that could wake up tomorrow and very well find themselves up in the rarified air of the A-List. Even if Technorati closed down there would be something spring up to take its place for the simple reason that we are a competitive bunch and the A-List is our badge of honor - good or bad.

Blogs come and go and those currently high flying on the A-List are no different they are just doing a better job of making the money while it is there to be made. For all we know c|net could buy TechCrunch tomorrow or Engadget could get sold to AOL but the one thing you can be sure of - the A-List won’t be going anywhere.

Note: as pointed out to me by Frederic at The Last Podcast the fact is engadget is already owned by AOL so I kinda blew that analogy all to hell

Conversation Tags: A-List, broadstuff, blogging