Blogging for dollars: market maturity or death knell?   |  May 1, 2007  

The entire point of blogs is the absence of editors and publishers, but wait—we may be coming

Blogs are the darlings of the online world. If you don’t blog...well, what’s wrong with you? But many traditional print journalists—a team on which I am proud to play—were initially very skeptical of the whole idea, at least when the topics stretched beyond Britney and American Idol and into the realms of serious news and analysis. These amateur writers couldn’t possibly be as good or reliable as us pros, we reasoned. Heck, these people publish their work without the benefit of an editor. Horror!

And our skepticism has been largely borne out: the blogosphere produces a great deal of crap. But we professional scribes—a group in which membership requires only that someone pays us—must also acknowledge blogs do occasionally outperform oldschool media (beating us to the punch on breaking news stories, for example) and that many bloggers possess both knowledge of their chosen subject and the writing skills required to pull off its presentation.

While blogs are now a sine qua non for literate people online, it is worth noting the movement is sliding into a more mature—and potentially critical—developmental phase. Companies are now signing up bloggers, aggregating the content and selling advertising space on the resulting Web site. Some of the revenue generated is then funnelled back to the writers. One example is Toronto-based b5media. From its Web site: “With more than 170 blogs and 2.5 million unique visitors a month, b5media offers advertisers a large, loyal and growing audience for companies looking to build major brand appeal. As well, our 170 blogs and 14 vertical channels make it easy to make highly targeted media buys.”

While writers always appreciate getting a cheque in the mail, is the selling of blogs good for blogging? Maybe not. When you believe in a blog it is because you are convinced the writer is passionate about a topic and a credible source. But if that blog is about, say, pet care and nutrition, will your faith be diminished when a pitch for Purina appears alongside?

However, one could also argue commercialization will be blogging’s saviour, because the very popularity of the movement is threatening to bury its progeny.

The Web is currently burdened with more than 70 million Weblogs and 1.4 new blogs are created every second, according to the Technocrati search service. With every tick of the clock it gets harder to pull the few good bits out of the undifferentiated content slurry.

Author Andrew Keen certainly sees this as a problem. From his new book The Cult of the Amateur: “If we keep up this pace, there will be over five hundred million blogs by 2010, collectively corrupting and confusing popular opinion about everything from politics, to commerce, to arts and culture. Blogs have become so dizzyingly infinite, that they’ve undermined our sense of what is true and what is false, what is real and what is imaginary. These days, kids can’t tell the difference between credible news by objective professional journalists and what they read on joeshmoe. blogspot.com.”

But when the mighty dollar comes to play, it changes the rules of the game. The very fact someone is willing to pay for a thing tends to be a pointer to some level of quality. (“Tends” because, after all, Tom Cruise is a star.) So perhaps we will become so overwhelmed with content that we will need to rely on a paid arbiter to tell us what is worthwhile, and the commercial sites will become the new publishing houses.

All of which brings blogs to where traditional media is now: quality writing vetted by professional editors and packaged for easy reading. And while that thought appalls blog purists, the content aggregation sites are here, so when your favourite blog goes commercial, you’ll be faced with a dilemma: stop reading or accept the new world order.

Peter Wolchak
Editor
pwolchak@backbonemag.com