Sure, I went broke trying to start it, it trashed...

“Sure, I went broke trying to start it, it trashed my life and I work all the time, but other than that, it wasn’t that hard to figure out.”

—Choire Sicha talking about The Awl and the real economics of blogging.

Don’t trust Choire’s humility. It’s sincere, but blogging as a business is hard work, all of it, even the typing part—and David Carr deservedly fawns all over the site in his column today.

What Carr surprisingly leaves out of his piece is the devoted legion of commenters The Awl has cultivated over its short lifespan. This is not something to be glossed over. If anything, this is the crux of what makes The Awl unique: the conversation is almost as vital, if not as vital, as the content.

And yet, as Carr point out: “The very idea of a little digital boutique flies in the face of all manner of conventional wisdom, chief of which is that scale is all that matters in an era of commoditized advertising sales.” (He also perpetuates this conventional wisdom by talking about traffic and traffic alone, as if that is the only metric that matters.)

The Awl clearly isn’t about scale. With scale you lose intimacy and without intimacy, The Awl loses part of what makes it unique.

So here’s my obvious question: Why isn’t a site like The Awl more attractive to advertisers? It’s a central irony of the Internet that economies of scale rule the day. Wasn’t the Internet meant to change all that? Economies of scale are the business of television, not editorial. Traditionally, newspapers and magazines appealed to niche audiences—that is what made their advertisements particularly effective. Wasn’t the Internet meant to change how advertisers reached consumers? Wasn’t it meant to make the experience more personal and individualized?

I do not envy David Cho. As both the technology and conventional wisdom of advertising struggle to catch up with a site like The Awl, Mr. Cho has to sell advertising the old fashioned way. But it won’t be this way forever. Sites like The Awl will compel advertisers to think about the opportunities to reach customers differently. Intimacy has to count for something, advertisers would be foolish to think otherwise.