PJ Media
If you go over to PJ Media, no longer OSM, but stuck for the moment with this:
as a logo, you can see what would make a lot of sense for the whole site happening in real time. Take a look at this “Blog Jam”. OK kids, I am not a brand consultant or media genius; but this is the first thing I have seen at PJ which is more interesting that what I can read on individual blogs.
Put this on your front page…call it “In the Other Corner” and come out fighting. Go inside with the groovy press feeds, blog links and other cool stuff. Develope some out of the office (and why the office??) talent to start reporting stories which will carry through in the long run; but right now go with your strength. Quick hits from big bloggers.
Once you have that up and running invite some guests. How is John Kerry enjoying jury duty? Would Bob Woodward like to talk about the fine grained editorial control enjoyed at MSM? And when they turn you down get some people we’d like to read like Kurzweil or Neal Stephenson or Peter Hitchens.
What PJ Media crashed on was what looked like a desperate bid for respectability. A stretch not to scare soccer mums or some such. Here’s the thing: good blogging is very scary. It turns pious orthodoxies on their heads. It looks for fact not wishes. It calls people idiots and worse. It is not corporate and it is not boring.
If the VCs want to make money they can do this bit of venture algebra – name bloggers bring traffic to the door, but the real money will come from people who have never heard of blogging or any of the featured blogs. These are the people who will suddenly discover an edgy, funny, serious and entirely fresh persective that they are not getting from MSM. Millions of people read blogs, tens of millions don’t – do the math.
November 26th, 2005 at 2:38 am
Except there’s no way to make any money from a blog. During the first internet bubble everyone with money to invest worked out that advertising on the web sucked—so what is the revenue stream?
November 26th, 2005 at 9:17 am
Advertising.
I don’t get it either, but ads on blogs targeted to the readers can bring in revenue. Not most blogs – apparently the average is about $10/month.
Neworking tends to bring in more revenue by making niche blogs. ie: Weblogs Inc.
For example, if I had a blog about hockey and the ads catered to hockey fans, the blog might make money. Apparently if it was part of a sports blog network, the money the advertisers pay gets shared by everyone.
I’ve never clicked on an online ad, that is not a concept to me, but it is to a lot of people.
It doesn’t take 3.5 million to run a network, I don’t doubt the PM bloggers were picked because they have a lot of traffic and most already run ads. They are required to put a code on their blogs that will accept common ads for the group.
I see it more as an advertising pyramid than citizen journalism. Perhaps thats why a fashion person at the OSM launch was looked at with some askance by pundits.:^) I’m probably not the only one wondering which way revenue is currently flowing – we’ll see.
Problogger is an example of someone who knows how to market and make money. He’s an exception for sure – you are correct – a blog making money is rare. For every one blogger that actually learns to make money, millions more don’t.