Monday, August 13, 2007

Blogosphere Sees Collapse In Advertising Revenue

[UPDATED below]

Here's something I just found out, from Booman Tribune:
The mid-level blogosphere has recently suffered a devastating loss of advertising revenue.
...
This is a systemic collapse, all across the board.
Some quick reactions to this: tell me if you think I'm bonkers:

[1] Why didn't I know about this a long time ago? Is there something wrong with me? And when it says "across the board", does that mean "across the whole board" or just "across the left liberal democrat board"? In other words, does anybody know whether the mid-level right conservative republican blogs are also suffering a devastating loss of revenue?

[2] This is very counter-intuitive, is it not? We hear all the time about how people are turning away from mainstream journalism for their news, turning more and more to the blogosphere for analysis, getting more concerned about things political, and ... you don't suppose there's some secret backroom conspiracy against bloggers, do you -- or maybe only left liberal democrat bloggers? Besides, who would do something like that?

[3] Speaking of conspiracy theories, you don't suppose this "systemic collapse, all across the board" is just a little story, do you? They're doing fine but they're all colluding to say they're not, to get more donations, or something ... You don't suppose they could get away with anything so brazen as that, do you?

[4] What will be the impact on blogs that don't advertise? Will they benefit from the "devastating loss" in the "mid-level blogosphere"? Will they pick up the slack? Will they be able to carry the burden? Or -- if you said "Yes" to number [2] -- will they be deprived of something else, since they cannot be deprived of anticipated advertising revenue? Do you think they'll have to pay a fee for not advertising?

~~~

UPDATE: I've been lurking in the comments thread of the Booman Tribune post I mentioned above, and here's the executive summary in answer to some of the questions that were asked in the comments thread of this post:
dataguy: How do blogs survive? What is the revenue picture?

BooMan: that depends on whether the blogger relies on the revenue from blogging or not. I used to have 7-8 ads running all the time. Now all the ads are going to Daily Kos, TPM, Huffington Post, Eschaton, firedoglake, etc. and they are not filtering down to sites like Smirking Chimp, Bob Geiger, Suburban Guerrilla, Cliff Schecter, My Left Wing, or even OpenLeft. We've also lost all the merchandising advertisers. It started to dry up in 2006, but since March of this year it has been almost zip, nada.
Unless I'm reading this wrong, BooMan is saying the top-level blogs (referred to elsewhere in the thread as Main Stream Blogs or MSB) are Daily Kos, Talking Points Memo, Eschaton, firedoglake, and etc. (I've heard of the first four, not the fifth) while the Mid-Level Blogs are such as Booman Tribune, My Left Wing, Suburban Guerilla, Cliff Schecter, Bob Geiger and even OpenLeft. (The recognition factor is a little lower here, but all the names I recognize do appear to be associated with political positions which are currently known as "left".) So in answer to my question above, I do believe we're talking about left liberal democrat blogs here ... or more accurately I should say BooMan was talking about left liberal democrat blogs when he said "all across the board". So there's another clarification for you.