Blog Networks and the Long Tail
You’ve heard it over and over - and as Paul Scrivens points out on his Wisdump blog - if you consistently make great content on your blog (and throw in interaction and luck, according to Mr. Scrivens), the readers will come.
TechCrunch, Engadget, boingboing, Gizmodo are all examples of great content blogs. There are a ton of them it seems to me, but how to monetize each idea, each blog? After all, most niches have a limited readership.
A couple of years ago, Gawker Media, Weblogs Inc. and then many others came along to bring all the great blog content they possibly could, under one roof, in order to aggregate and optimize the advertising revenue potential.
Lately, networks such as B5 media (with bloggers such as Jim and Tris over on One by One) and companies such as Pay Per Post have specifically targeted the revenue potential of blog aggregation. B5 media does it by creating 100s of niche blogs - a Long Tail of blogs, if you will. Taken together, the strategy is that the blogs will provide enough revenue to sustain the blog network model. But alone, not any one site is a business unto itself.
Pay Per Post, on the other hand, pays existing bloggers for making posts and has been villified for its less than transparent practices involving payments to bloggers for advertorial posts that are not identified as such.
Regarding the Long Tail, Chris Anderson who coined the term, now writes over on his blog that Wired continues its transformation as it builds out its own network of blogs including the new Danger Room, Wired Science and Game|Life.
It is evident that the power of the network model continues to work for bloggers. Still, individuals creating new blogs and content solely for the pursuit of becoming part of the blogosphere’s conversation, such as what two of our ContextWeb advisors - Joe Tedd and Tom Yamada - are starting to do, remains the most exciting for me.
-- John Ebbert
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