Sooner or later, blogs and advertisers are going to merge. Yeah, it probably won't be a pretty wedding or honeymoon, but the marriage is gotta happen. It's a shotgun wedding, whether we like it or not.
A Wired article today talks about a new site and company, Blogversations.com that is looking to team up bloggers and advertisers. The blogosphere has spoken. They're not happy.
[BEGIN RANT]
I see two camps of blogs: 1)Blogging for dollars blogs and 2)Blogging for hobby blogs. Blogging for hobby is great, and is an exciting, fast-growing phenomenon. They're virtual diaries into the conscious minds of other people. Great stuff. Great to write (it's therapeutic), great to read. But not a business people can turn into a livelihood.
For the "blogging for dollars" to work, there has to be a sustainable business model. Time and time again, the Internet has demonstrated that the "paying subscriber model" doesn't work for online content (other than porn). People aren't going to pay to read blogs. Period. Sorry, but it's true.
That leaves advertising-supported blogs, a strategy that Blogversations.com is trying to own. And the blogosphere is up in arms: But what about the purity and sanctity of blogs? Won't bloggers be manipulated to write about things or say things or do things, just because an advertiser is dangling dollar bills in front of them?
HELLO! Welcome to Pollyanna-ville. Population: YOU. On an internet (notice the lowercase "i" by the way) full of spam, misleading ad banners, Google-bombing and the like, our little pure and clean blogging corner of the universe won't stay this way forever. The marketers are knocking on the door. Do we let them in, or just wait until they bulldoze our back fence during the night? If there is money to be had, the marketers (myself included in this group) will find a way to make it.
So, that being said, Blogversations.com doesn't seem to be acknowledging what I think is the most important part of the advertsing-supported blogging issue - FULL DISCLOSURE. I want to know if a particular blog is being supported by a particular advertiser. Just let me know. If the content on the site is informative, interesting and compelling, I'll continue to read it whether it's sponsored or not. Crappy content? You can forget about it, whether someone paid for the trash or not.
Media work on two models, subscriber-sponsored (like HBO and Consumer Reports) and ad-supported (like freaking everything else in the world). We're not going to pay to read blogs, so that means we're going to have to find a way to deal with advertisers.
[END RANT]
That's my 0.02.
-aB
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3 comments:
I agree. The Blogosphere forgets that this is an issue that newspapers, magazines and radio/tv news departments have been dealing with since their inception. They have been able to deal with this problem and Web blogs are going to have to figure out a way to do the same.
There's a good article on a similar topic over at www.natterjackpr.com.
Interesting thoughts. I don't think that Blogversations.com will make it.
Jeremy Pepper posts an interesting look at the same Blogversations subject on his POP! Public Relations blog. Check out the article here.
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