This Store Will Close.

A new little three-story condo building was completed early this year on West 4th Street between 6th and 7th Avenues. It has three stores on the street level. They were slow to rent; the commercial rents in this neighborhood are astronomical. One of the narrow stores has become a "men's spa" called "Why Not?" (Metrosexual pampering? Gay massage parlor? Who knows? There's a "Men Spa Finger Pressure" a few blocks away on Thompson Street that employs tarty-looking Asian women. What zoning loophole is this?) The double-width corner store rented to a "European crafts" gift store called "Priroda: Gifts From Nature." It filled up with blond-wood toys with round heads and dowel-rod legs and rope tails and manes. There are choo-choo trains and monkeys and little boys and girls, all in that same bland, Scandinavian-Polish style. They're not that cute. I took one look and my heart sank. I thought, "I give it a few months." We New Yorkers can size up new businesses like that, and we're rarely wrong. It makes you feel bad for the misguided small entrepreneurs who sink so much cash and effort and hope into their obviously doomed dreams.

Sure enough, no more than three months after its opening, Priroda is having a "store closing sale." At 15% off, I still don't want any of those things. Not even at 75% off.

I got the same feeling yesterday when I followed an unfamiliar link from my SiteMeter, as is my wont, and found myself at . . . Pajamas Media! I hadn't registered the significance of "osm.org." (.org?? I thought the whole point was, this was where blogs would turn a profit?) Believe it or not, I had never visited Pajamas before. I'm too small a blogger for it to concern me personally, and the controversy as I had followed it at Althouse and Dennis the Peasant had further turned me off.

I looked at the Pajamas page that reproduced a post from The Business of Life that linked to me, and I got the same sinking feeling I got when I looked in the window of Priroda. This business is going to fail. (Granted, I've had some negative preconditioning, but I trust my eye.) Even the style is similar. There's too much white space, and the graphics are thin and uninspiring. (Compare Daou Report or PunditDrome, where you can hardly decide what you want to read first.)

There's some numerical backup for my sinking feeling. As Ann Althouse pointed out to me in an e-mail, the coveted link from Pajamas, so assiduously courted by so many, has brought precious little traffic. I count 19 hits out of the last 160, yesterday and today. (Told you I'm a wee blogger.) If it isn't driving more traffic than that, it makes you wonder how much traffic it's drawing, and, more intangibly, how much credibility it has with its readers. Has anyone yet experienced a PajamaLanche?

Maybe it's time to put money on my hunch and join the Pajamas Media Death Pool, where people are betting on the date of the venture's discreet demise.

UPDATE: And then on the other hand, look what a link from Althouse does to your SiteMeter. More hits in five minutes than from PJM in two days.

Any questions?

Comments

[Sissy Willis]

Ouch. :(

[Rick Lee]

Yeah... I've gotten a couple of Althouse links. Not an Instalanche, but a lot. BTW... congrats on that Google search link for "Catholic Masturbation". That's gotta be worth more than a PJM link.

[gruntled]

Well, I give up what is this tempest in a teapot about? Who is Roger Simon? What is Pajama Media? Does this have any tie back to centrism?

[J Pierpont Flathead]

It's been years and years since I experienced a PajamaLanche.

[amba]

Oh, that is funny.

[KaneCitizen]

I think they should call the Althouse parallel to an Instalanche...

(Drum roll...)

A "Double-A Battery."

[Charlie (Colorado)]

I still think people are expecting a lot from a venture that's been in operation nearly three whole weeks.

[amba]

True, but Charlie, with all the venture capital they raised, couldn't they have hired a really smart Web designer???

[Scott Ferguson]

My site, PunditDrome.com , got a few hits from your link. Thanks -- I added your blog to the roster. (I can definitely be bribed!)

PunditDrome will never fail, because PunditDrome hardly costs anything to run. It's just an English garden of blogs. We won't make our first million with it.

Maybe with $3.5 million, Hazman and I can turn it into a business. Who knows.

[Asher - Dreams Into Lightning]

They say there's no such thing as bad publicity.

I only read Althouse these days because she's so entertaining on the subject of Pajamas Media, and I followed Ann's link to your site for the same reason. Ann has probably written more about Pajamas - and drawn more attention to PJM - than anyone else. (You commented on this yourself, in your post.) Of course, posting a snarky comment about PJM is a sure way to get an approving link from Althouse, which you've obviously done. And as you said, this drove your traffic up.