About three or four years ago, people began to get the idea that they could make money from blogging. Some media entrepreneurs began to see blogs as sort of like online magazines - something that could be cheap to create but could, in theory, generate lots of advertising revenue. They began to set up lots of blogs targeting different groups of readers and different niche interests. The companies they created became known as blog networks and, for a while, there was a lot of optimism about their potential to make money from online journalism.
If you want to find out more, Clive Thompson wrote a good piece on the rise of blog networks and blog moguls, for New York Magazine. Since then, the blog networks haven't made as much money as people thought they might back when they started. But several are still going strong, especially in the States - and some individual blogs and bloggers are very successful - for example, Perez Hilton, Mashable (a blog about social media), Paid Content (about 'digital content', which was bought by The Guardian Media Group).
So why am I going about this. Well, the next assessment is to create a group blog, the online equivalent of a commercial magazine, the kind of site that one of the big commercial blog networks would do.
The idea is to work in groups of 4-6 - we'll decide once we've come up with some ideas. The aim will be to run each group blog as if it were a going concern for one week. You'll need to set up the blog, sort out the design, develop an editorial approach and style and then plan and manage regular daily updates for one week.
What we need to do now is some competition analysis. We need to look at what's out there - to figure out if there's a gap in the market or if there's a niche interest or an audience we could serve better.
The key players in the commercial world are Nick Denton, whose Gawker Media pioneered the idea of using blogs to create lean, mean money-making online magazines. His best known blog is Gawker.
His competition in the US came first from Weblogs Inc, which was set up by Jason Calacanis but was then bought by AOL. Another key player in America is Federated Media, which was set up by John Batelle. Over here, Shiny Media has been trying to give the blogzine idea a British spin.
There are other smaller operations trying to set up blog networks - Breaking Media, which runs Dealbreaker, which covers Wall St.
As part of the research for the project, let's look at a number of blogs put together by the American-based companies. Here's a few you could try.
Gawker, Jalopnik, Idolator , Jezebel, Valleywag, The Consumerist, Lifehacker and Defamer - all Denton blogs.
Slashfood, DS Fanboy, DIY Life, Green Daily, Cinematical and Engadget - all Weblogs Inc productions
43 Folders, BoingBoing, Cool Tools, Search Blog, Tech Dirt, Trend Hunter, Silicon Alley Insider and Uncrate - all Federated Media sites.
Corrie Blog, Bridalwave, ShinyShiny, Shoewawa, Bayraider, Crafty Crafty, My Chemical Toilet, Wii Wii, Dolly Mix and Hippy Shopper - all Shiny Media sites.
I want you to look at some of these and try to answer to the following questions.
- What's the blog about?
- Who is it aimed at and why would they read it?
- How often is it updated? When is it updated?
- What kind of things does it cover?
- What's the style/tone/attitude of the posts? Who writes them?
- How does the blog use links? Multimedia? Audience participation?
- What do you think of the design?
- Do you think the blog makes money? if so, how?
OK - once you've had chance to think about this, we'll pool ideas and see if we can identify some differences between the way each of these businesses approaches commerical blogging.
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