Political Markets

I find this amusing, the two big supposedly left political sites on the internet, dailykos and talking points memo, are essentially entrepreneurial efforts. Their counterparts are not.

It's bad enough these jokers [Heritage Foundation] can't hack it out in the market economy. At least they could use all the foundation money to power up some reliable servers.

Australia has nothing as entrepreneurial as dailykos or tpm, the closest would be online opinion. There just doesn't appear to be the political market for it. Politics in Australia is heavily institutionalised.
Lyn: That Quadrant is similarly subsidised is similarly amusing. Go the free market. For other people.
avocadia: When you have 300,000,000+ insanely rich citizens, your niches are bigger than some mainstream Australian markets. That gives you the flexibility to do things that vanishingly small percentages of the potential consumers care about and still be wildly successful.
cam: Australia has 20 million insanely rich citizens, but we have nada. Marshall has a point anyway, most of what passes for conservatism in the US is reliant on the state or collective largesse. Sites like his have embraced economic liberalism better than most of the conservative commentators who are institutionalised like all the Auian ones are.
avocadia:
Australia has 20 million insanely rich citizens, but we have nada.
Yeah, that's my point; I'm not sure 20 million is enough to sustain anything but middle-of-the-mall because anything that is niche or fringe simply doesn't have enough of an audience to survive. And yammering about politics is very niche indeed, hence nothing in Australia. I guess I got my face rubbed in that a little when I was there this month; shops that sell nothing but cupcakes or peanut butter sandwiches - you could dream of doing that in Australia but don't expect to be particularly successful.
Lyn: Last I heard the leftish The Monthly circulation was in the low 20,000 and successfully independent of Blackwell where it got its chance in life. That's the circulation of the most successful recreational fishing magazine in the country. Better in fact.

Quadrant doesn't release circulation figures because, as a protected species, it doesn't have to. But estimates have it around the 5,000 or less mark.

Note The Australian has been running op eds lately praising Quadrant and its past and present editors. Why, I wonder, would this broadsheet champion of the free market do such a thing?
cam: Was that in New York? Greater New York (including NJ and CT suburbs) is the same population as Australia. Then again Phoenix has stuff like that and it is the same population as Sydney or Melbourne.

TPM's business model is based upon political corruption. That has been as endemic in Australia as it has in the US, especially at the end of the Howard government's tenure, but we saw nothing even on 1/10th the scale pop up in Australia like TPM.

The only one similar was GetUp and they were a clone of MoveOn. I think it is because America and Americans are just flat out better at entreprenuerialism and capitalism than Australians.
avocadia: The peanut butter sandwich restaurant - not shop, restaurant - and at least one cupcake store started in New York, yeah. The other cupcake store that I know of is an LA thing, although the New York store has opened a branch in LA, just a few blocks down Wiltshire Blvd, sparking - and I shit you not - what the tourist guides refer to as a cupcake war.

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