Thanks to the recent guffaw at
CBS News, blogging appeared on the radar screen of the
national consciousness. For many people, the media attention
devoted to the scandal made sense, but the subsequent
mention of blogging and its role in journalism, for example,
did not make sense. With tens of millions of page views
daily, millions of active bloggers, and its increasing
mention on the world stage, blogging, it is safe to say, has
immerged from a niche activity to a soon to be media giant.
The simplicity of blogs often makes it hard for some to
understand why blogs deserve the attention they have
received. Blogs look rather unimpressive on the whole. They
offer limited interactivity and an almost too templated look
and feel. While personal, they don’t feel personalized. What
they do offer is a means to automatically post text and
pictures in a linear, auto-archiving fashion. They allow
those people that do not know how to create a website, and
those that simply do not want to spend the time to modify
the html, a means to add thoughts in a matter of seconds. In
many respects, blogs mimic the core functionality found in
programs like Microsoft Word. If I were to desire it, I could be
typing this article straight to my blog versus writing it
out and having others publish it online.
The features, while simple,
save time and enable users to spend time on activities that
prior to blogging were not within the reach of the average
person. Psychologically too, blogging allows people to
connect with some innate desire to be heard and read. People
could easily write the equivalent in their paper journals or
in a text editor, but it is reasonable to assume that unless
highly motivated they won’t. Blogs add that element of “just
maybe.” They appeal to the dreamer in people, the desire to
be discovered, listened to, respected. The internet acts as
the catalyst to making the blog something more than a
journal. It becomes, for many, that personal window they want
to share and have others know about.
In contrast to perception,
blogs now represent something other than a bunch of people
spewing their ideas. Some of the top blogs receive hundreds
of thousands of visitors a day. Hundreds of thousands of
visitors, most of whom represent the more educated, harder
to reach consumers means something else… money. Like
journalists, many bloggers can make a full-time living off
their blog. Unlike email marketing and other web marketing,
marketing on blog sites is still in its infancy. There are
only a handful of companies that specialize on monetization
of blogs.
Google, who owns one of the
top blog sites, Blogger.com, has cleverly integrated its
AdSense program. Unlike Barry Diller, Chairman and CEO IAC/InterActiveCorp,
whose holdings include Hotels.com, Expedia.com, Hotwire.com,
TicketMaster.com, Match.com, and CitySearch.com among
others, Google has an innate mastery of cross promotion. If
you open up a blogger.com account, they pitch users on their
AdSense program. It allows them to increase their Google
user base, create more inventory, and make money off of that
inventory.
Direct Marketers too have
started to experiment with the blog. Remember that blogs
make for an easy way to store and manage content which works
especially well for text link advertisements. Also, the fact
that people associate blogs with content, has made for some
blogs whose content is text ads but doesn't come off like
those make money from home recruitment pages. One of the ones on blogger promotes nothing but eBay, yet it reads like an eBay
manual to the uninitiated not a “I care only about you
clicking and signing up - do it now” pitch. To those
familiar with the ads, the purpose of the blog becomes
apparent. More than one person, however, will have stumbled
across that blog, either through the community nature of the
blog or through the search engine friendly nature of the
text pages.
In many ways, it is hard to
believe that blogging sites have been around for five years
or more. Slashdot.org, and Lockergnome.com represent two of
the earlier blogs that, given their scope, no longer seem like blogs. And despite the blogs apparent differences from any
type of media that most of this newsletter’s readers
encounter, they will represent a force to leverage, either
directly or indirectly. Blogs can be our friends. For
example, eBay who has used the blogs to its adbantage and
has cleverly found new affiliates. However, blogs can also
be one’s enemy. For example, CBS who has had to face
the viral power of the millions. What role they
can play for direct response remains to be seen, but they
will play a role.
Jay Weintraub
