I’m sure many of you will
have noticed that I’ve been struggling to keep up with my blog posts lately, as
life at work has become exceedingly hectic over the last few weeks (since my
transition from MedComm to MarComm). On top of that, I’ve also had two overseas
guests visit this month, attended several events like PodCamp, produced Episode
#2 of ETechCast, and now preparing for the Podcast Expo; so let’s just say that
life’s gotten a little bit crazy around here.

Anyway, enough of the lame
excuses…Here’s a brief synopsis and some quotes from an article that I’ve been
meaning to write about for a while.

This month
started off with a really fascinating article in the September issue of Business 2.0, called Blogging for Dollars. The article
discusses how some top bloggers and blog-related services are now starting to
turn a (serious) profit and transition from hobbyist to full-time blogging.

In fact, I
would personally say that 2006 is a significant year for the blogging and podcasting
communities as it’s really the first year that a number of people have started quitting
their well-paid and well-established day jobs to go into full-time blogging as
a legitimate, profitable, and much more motivating business.

One person
that immediately comes to mind is Biz 2.0’s own Om Malik, who now blogs full-time
at GigaOm. And, of course, everyone in the Web
2.0 world knows Mike Arrington’s TechCrunch
blog, which is apparently raking in a cool sixty grand a month in advertising…

Arrington,
a 36-year-old entrepreneur behind a long list of unrecognizable startups, has suddenly
become one of the rising stars of Silicon Valley.
Why? The answer lies in TechCrunch, Arrington's blog about new technologies and
companies. In the year since he launched the site, he has amassed such a strong
following that he's become a go-to person for VCs and tech execs looking to
leak corporate tidbits or announce news. More than 1.5 million readers
regularly check out his site. But here's what gives Arrington real distinction:
He's pulling in $60,000 in ad revenue every month. That's 10 times what the
site was making earlier this year, which was when Arrington, convinced of the
potentially monstrous riches ahead, quit his day job as president of a startup
to blog full-time.

Here’s a
couple more good quotes from the article…

What has
changed? For starters, blogs today benefit from what might be termed uneconomies of
scale: They are so cheap to create and operate that a lone blogger or a small
team can, with the ever-expanding reach of the Internet, amass vast
audiences and generate levels of profit on a per-employee basis that
traditional media companies can only fantasize about.

At the same
time, advertisers—shunning old-line media in favor of the Web—are discovering
the unique power of blogs. Blogs offer a personal touch in the mediascape; small sites
have become our guides to a content-saturated world. As such, their
recommendations are highly valued by readers—which naturally has made
advertisers take notice…

Still, the
blogging-for-dollars phenomenon is only in its infancy, and already blog ad spending
is roughly twice what it was last year. With overall Web advertising expected to grow by
50 percent to $23.6 billion in 2010, it's certain that more and more ad dollars
will land on blogs. For a growing cadre of bloggers, the opportunities to score
fat profits from pumping out posts on whatever their particular passions might
be are widening—and one consequence could be a radical reshaping of our notions
of how to build a successful media company.

In response
to this article, here’s what Liz
Gannes from GigaOm
had to say:

Business
2.0 covers blogging entrepreneurs in its latest cover story, calling the upstarts “Real businesses, with
real revenue streams from real advertisers — not overhyped next big things with
pick-a-number valuations based on selling out someday to some overenthusiastic
big-media sugar daddy.” Writers Paul Sloan and Paul Kaihla herald the entrance of
“mainstream blogdom” (the MSB?). Obviously,
since B2.0 is Om’s former employer and he
continues to write a column for them, there are a lot of conflicts of interest
here, so we’re throwing the rookie into the ring! Yay…New publishing
technologies are thrusting media empire-building into warp speed. We all know
how dude-with-a-blog can quickly turn to dude-with-a-brand, but it’s not clear
how dude-as-a-company will work. Don’t blink!

So, as you
can see, blogging is getting BIG BUCKS and lots of attention. It’s becoming a
real, profitable business for some folks (IMHO, podcasting is quickly moving in
that direction as well) and major corporations are starting
to embrace blogs as a form of connecting with their customers and/or replacing traditional
press releases with them as well.

Furthermore,
advertisers are also recognizing the unique ability of blogs (and podcasts) to
reach highly targeted markets, so ad dollars are starting to shift into these new
mediums; though there is still much confusion over the metrics and worth of
such campaigns, as advertisers fall back on traditional rates for traffic
generation from these new mediums.

Overall, it’s
been a good year for blogging, podcasting, and other social media, and I think
that 2006 will definitely be remembered as the year that these applications come
out of their perceived shadow of being social devices for teens and attention
seekers and into the light of a mainstream media powerhouse. So…Got blog?

More
write-ups in response to this article can be found here:
- http://www.techmeme.com/060822/p53.