What is the revenue model?
I feel like we really have two sets of blogging to talk about, these divid themselves into video and audio, and print. While there are many similarities, when comparing it to mass media we’re breaking them up.
We’ll start with video and audio, because i understand that. What makes advertising nice in these is that you can physically plug your products, place them into your videos, use the product in your audio. Whether its something simple like how Randy from American Idol always straightens his coke cup, or the ads that make the break. And these things are easily transferable to video blogs (or podcasts, depending on your desired terminology). As sites like youtube and revver start to make business models for uploaders we’ll see how it pans out. What i’m looking to see is whether it will force people to make good content, but limited quantities, or lots of things hoping to score on bringing people back to check out their stuff. With metacafe’s business scheme the video has to have a certain number of views and a certain rating. Its not likely that a weekly show will be able to get good enough numbers to support that, but if the person only makes one that gets some business, they can make some money. We’ll see what happens.
Writing online is a lot easier and as such there are a lot more people doing it. Whats happened is that big people arent advertising on blogs the same way they do for the newspaper. The audience isnt guaranteed and returns can be tracked, which is actually not desirable. Its one thing to say that 1,000 people read your blog, but if none of them are clicking your ads then its not worth a thing. And as you don’t rent out your advertising space online like you do in the paper, it makes for some different things.
How do you think blogs need to change in order to be financially viable?
Is production value as important a factor in judging online content as it is on TV and print?
Do you see newspapers adding blog posts to their sections, or bringing in outside writers found on blogs?
