Why is there no Blog Network from Bangladesh?

Blog Network is something that is a collection of blogs run by most of the time by a company or rarely by an individual. A blog can based on a similar topic (business, sprots etc) or can have a number of blogs with different topics. The basic idea is to earn money with the power of a large network. Most of the blog networks are in USA and some of the big ones are: Weblogs Inc, B5media, Creative Weblogging, Gawker etc. I am perhaps the first professional blogger from Bangladesh to work in a blog network. I joined Know More Media on March 2006. Know More Media got closed in 2008. I also wrote for Blog Republic Network for a few days in 2006 and then in 2008, I wrote for Cosmo Fair Network for few months. Anyway, my question is that why there is no blog network from Bangladesh in Internet?

I think a very simple answer is that still, here most people do not understand the potential of blog networks and English language blogging. In fact, there are very few blogs in English language from Bangladesh updated regularly. The funny part is that English is a very important language in Bangladesh. There is no shortage of highly educated people who can write in this language quite competently. Well, the main problem I see is that there is lack of readership in this language. There are some Bangla community blogs and almost all of them are doing well according to Alexa Ranking.

I would not say that the Bangla Community blogs are merely hobby blogs as you can find a lot of good content posted daily. Even it is excellent that many people have now got the habit of expressing their thoughts in this new medium. The problem is that most people in this country who are blog readers mainly read in Bangla not in English. The same goes for writers too.

Now a days, some bloggers from Bangladesh use Adsense and some other popular advertisements in their English blogs but the number is still not significant. In Bdjobs, I can find ads for blogging content writing and blogging platforms like Joomla or WordPress. Some job advertisements for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) can be found too. This gives me a lot of hope for the future because in 2006, it was very odd for most people I knew to talk about Blogging, SEO or Adsense. Rezwanul of The 3^rd World View has perhaps the best list of Bangladeshi blogs. He is perhaps the most known Bangladeshi blogger online today. I admire his dedication to make blogging familiar and popular to the people of Bangladesh. Last few years, Rezwanul lived in Germany and now he is Indonesia. Still, he is trying his best to promote Bangladeshi blogs in his own blog and in Global Voice Online. I hope to write a separate entry about him in near future.

I have already talked about the problem of language in making a blog network in Bangladesh. Another problem is that we do not have that many high profile and influential blogs and bloggers from this country yet. We need some role models. The absence of Venture Capital (VC) funding companies in Bangladesh is perhaps an even bigger obstacle in this regard. The entrepreneurs of many of the leading blog networks first worked very hard to get some decent amount of traffic and received VC funding to develop further. The same thing happened for the Indian Blog network Instablogs. Instablogs could get:

“500-800k $ (approximately 2-3.5 crores) at a valuation of 7 million $ i.e. 30 crores approximately.”

Well, when I can see that there is only one notable blog network from India and perhaps none from Pakistan, then it is perhaps all right after all that there is no blog network from Bangladesh. Secondly, in this time of economic recession, it is perhaps not a good time to start a network after all.