Before I started writing for TechCrunch, I did a brief stint at The Next Web, a tech blog published out of Amsterdam in The Netherlands.
It was fun, mainly because its founders are positively insane and famously quirky. Today, they’re taking their online media company forward with the launch of eight new local blogs focused on technology, startups, news, internet culture and the future of the Web.
The international ‘hubs’, as they’ve been baptized, will be published in each country’s native language, which is the main difference between this network and the late blognation (which I also used to work for, unfortunately).
The countries that The Next Web is launching in today, each with a dedicated editor firmly located on the ground, are France, Russia, South Korea, The Netherlands, Argentina, Turkey, Romania and Germany.
Of course, our own TechCrunch Europe will keep on fiercely competing for stories with the European ones.
The editors of the local blogs are also responsible for bringing in the needed advertising dollars to keep the venture viable. Only part of the ad space on the country blogs gets reserved for run-of-network campaigns, from which the revenue is shared between the publisher and the local editors. The same goes for local events. Basically, most of the writers get paid based on the revenue they manage to generate on their own, which is 100% reserved for them.
Best of luck to them, but in my educated opinion it’s not going to be an easy feat for each editor to grow the blog to a size that attracts major advertisers, and even then it’s going to be an uphill battle to turn it comfortably revenue-generating.
In addition to the native-language blogs, The Next Web is debuting two blogs aggregating English blog posts and news articles covering a whole continent, starting with Europe and Asia. Unlike the country-specific blogs, which will be managed by (at least) one full-time editor, each of the continent blogs will have at least three editors.
More details are available here, including the names of the local editors.