With Funding For Svbtle, Dustin Curtis Wants To Build A Business In Long-Form Online Content

Dustin Curtis is a developer, designer, and blogger who has accomplished the rare feat of getting a blogging platform off the ground. Called Svbtle, it launched in early 2012 as a sort of application-required Tumblr — a few tech thought leaders using a uniform minimalist theme to publish long posts. But it’s grown to more than 200 writers and raised an undisclosed amount of money, Curtis announced today, from early-stage investors including SV Angel, CrunchFund, and Betaworks in what appears to be a second round of funding. It had previously also raised money from angels including Y Combinator, where Curtis was an alum. What’s different about Svbtle from LiveJournal, Pownce, Vox, Posterous, if not WordPress.com or Myspace or even Twitter? Unlike the many other sites over the years that have tried to marry content management systems and social networking features, Svbtle is trying to serve professional-level writers. Instead of making money by selling ads around unlimited mixed-quality content (the Facebook model), it hopes to figure out the high-quality business, as I covered back in March. The CMS gets out of your way so you can focus on your words. There’s a pane for writing down story ideas and a simple text editor that lets you easily preview and toggle to publish. Each author gets a unique logo (Curtis’ is a lightning bolt, MG’s is a lemon), and the Svbtle theme also comes with a Liking mechanism — hold your cursor over the “Kudos” circle to the right of each article and you’ll give the author a point. It doesn’t do more at this point, but maybe he’ll make a leaderboard out of it one day. Also, there are free copy-editing and fact-checking services for all. And while the site is getting millions of pageviews in aggregate, Curtis believes the real innovation will be in monetizing high-quality content. “I just don’t know what it is yet,” he explains in the interview below. Curtis launched the site by delivering a virtuoso performance as an independent blogger. After his previous startup didn’t work out, he began writing sharply argued posts on major tech topics, along with philosophical product reviews. His personal brand — perfectionism, minimalism, intellectual superiority — has helped advertise Svbtle and has attracted lead designers, developers, investors, and bloggers who would normally be on Tumblr, WordPress, or other networks. Besides MG, there’s Dom Leca of popular email client Sparrow, digital music

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