Posted in On the DL Podcast
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09/17 2010

DL436: Phil From Gunaxin Talks Blog Building, Ethics & Vick Fantasy Morals

Posted by Dan Levy.

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Each week,  I’ll be chatting with a member of the Blogger Fantasy League to talk a little trash, learn about their work and talk about issues in our industry. This week, I play against Phil Van der Vossen of Gunaxin.com. As he calls it, Gunaxin is “stuff for guys” from sports to girls to games to pop culture to food…and everything in between. It’s a men’s lifestyle site, like Maxim, but without paying for all the girlie photos.

We actually talk quite a bit about that idea — taking content from other places and making it your own — and what the ethics are in doing so. If you’ve ever met Phil, read his stuff or listened to him talk on other shows, you know he pulls absolutely zero punches. And if you know anything about me, you know I respect the hell out of people who are willing to call other people out.

So there’s a lot of that — calling out other sites for gaming the system or for taking others’ original content and making their own buck off of it. Is that just part of the deal when you write something online? Is the internet a meritocracy or a forced apprenticeship? Do the bigger sites keep rolling downhill because they are the best, or because they are the bigger sites and can generate more traffic by using your work than you can for creating the original? It’s obviously a little of both, but we give some specific examples of how the rich have gotten richer off the work of the little guys.

And that’s not to say that Gunaxin is one of the little guys, at least not anymore. They do a ton of traffic across their entire brand and while they aren’t Maxim yet, don’t be surprised if they get there in a few years. I talk with Phil about his model for success — from the content on the site and how to balance aggregation with original works to how he promotes everything and monetizes it.

Gunaxin has a podcast. Those sonsabitches get paid. I’m obviously doing something wrong. So the conversation admittedly turns into a little bit of a blog therapy session for a guy just starting up a site he wants traffic for. Phil has some great knowledge and advice for anyone in my shoes.

He then spins the conversation on me, asking about Michael Vick. In our Blogger Fantasy League, I needed a quarterback after losing Kevin Kolb and Matthew Stafford in week one. So I put in a waiver claim for Matt Hasselbeck because I felt he was the best long term option in case Kolb comes back, but just isn’t that good. I thought about claiming Vick, but decided it wasn’t worth the risk of his potential inconsistency, and felt I needed an option for the whole season and not just for the week or two that Kolb is on the shelf.

Never once did I think about the moral implications of rooting for Vick. Not once. I thought about it during the draft with Ben Roethlisberger, but only in the sense that it impacted the first 4-6 weeks of the season. Heck, I used to not pick guys on the Raiders because I rooted for Denver. Now, there’s a trip to the Super Bowl on the line.

So, as Phil poses, does real-life morality take a backseat to fantasy?

This is one of those episodes that I love doing (except near the end when his phone turned into Tron). Neither of us knew where the conversation was going to go, but it went and it’s a really interesting look into the day-to-day struggles of having your light on and hoping people come in and buy a sandwich. Or in this case, read and listen.

Thanks for doing both. And thanks to Phil for taking the time. Go read and listen to Gunaxin as well.

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Posted on September 17, 2010 at 8:37AM

 

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