Sean Parker Is Launching a Blog
The Sean Parkington Post? Seanster? Blogify? It's not clear what former Facebook president Sean Parker will call his forthcoming blog, but it's clear the famed tech hustler is serious about the endeavor: He's hired a firm to build buzz, and is already running ads and planning to hire writers.
We reached out to Parker after hearing from an ad industry source that the tech playboy had been paying out of his own pocket for Facebook ads, like the one below, driving people to his Facebook fan page.
That sounded considerably more ego driven and less savvy than Parker's involvement with landmark ventures like Napster, Plaxo, Facebook and Spotify. But it turns out the 32 year old Founder's Fund partner has bigger plans. He told us via email:
I'm getting ready to launch a blog so that—like you guys at Gawker—I can stand on my soapbox and waste everyone's time with my useless thoughts. Only I suspect that my thoughts will be less useless and definitely less mean spirited and obnoxious than yours. In preparation for this, I hired a firm to manage my fan page (and profile) which had recently been generating a lot of traffic. They wanted to experiment with ad buys. So they are running a set of experiments now with copy and targeting. This is a pretty common things for public figures on Facebook to do. [Links added.]
So what will this blog be like? We imagined something along the lines of venture capitalist Fred Wilson's excellent "A VC," which offers a short essay on technology and business each morning.
Parker said his venture will be something like that but with "more of a monthly essay thing with daily commentary and a couple very smart young writers who will be doing follow-up on the long form pieces that I write." Given the recent implosion of TechCrunch, a favorite of real and imagined Silicon Valley power players, that sounds like a smart idea, assuming "undisciplined" Parker can stay focused on the venture. And the tabloids will still have to themselves stories involving Parker and his singer girlfriend Alexandra Lenas, frenemy Lindsay Lohan, or any of the various nightclub bouncers Parker comes into contact with. That's an arrangement a Silicon Valley operator like Parker would call a "win win."
[Photo of Parker via Getty Images]