Can UK blogs ever score the multi-million pound exits that some of their American counterparts have? Ten days after former Shiny Media co-founder Ashley Norris left the blog network to strike out with a new online video company, he wrote an interesting piece on TechCrunch UK detailing why he thought that British blogs, despite a number of very good ones, had had only “limited success.”

While his conclusions were hardly surprising, it was his depth of analysis and his examples that ultimately made for depressing reading—e.g. would Shiny’s football blog, whoateallthepies.tv, be “significantly larger,” if the BBC’s own license-fee funded online footy site didn’t exist? Aside from the “omnipotent BBC,” Norris blames the limited number of UK eyeballs, the ad industry’s lack of imagination, lack of UK media entrepreneurs, lack of VC support, and too much competition as hampering the British blog industry. Certainly, when Messy Media, whose blogs included the politics-oriented Westmonster and celeb gossip site Glitterditch, decided to quit the blogging business in late July, some of their conclusions were similar, namely that “the audiences for these titles didn’t warrant continued investment.”

Norris’ co-founders Chris Price and Katie Lee, meanwhile, have responded with their own post on the business, noting that revenue was increasing (though no specifics on just how much), and traffic was up 26 percent year-on-year. They’ve also tried to address some of the complaints thrown at them. For example, some of the comments that followed Norris’s post criticised Shiny Media, saying that content quality had declined as the blog network pursued more and more ad revenue. Still, no actual rebuttal of Norris’ very valid points.