On Saturday, an article was published in the Financial Post which talked about the corporatization of blogs and the newly emerging blog markets...
I encourage you to read the article.
In the story, there was an interview with Mr. Om Malik, a senior writer with Business 2.0 magazine, which got my attention.
"I'm very patient so I know one day my blog will make money," said Mr. Malik, a senior writer with Business 2.0 magazine whose technology blog can be found at gigaom.com. "The problem is at some point I do need to make money. I have enough traffic and enough money from Google ads to pay the bills but the profits [now] are just enough to buy me a carton of cigarettes."
I find it a little discouraging that more and more corporate blogs are joining the blogosphere. With the exception of a few, the quality of corporate blogs seems to be lacking in a major way.
While I don't think the majority of bloggers are in it for what little money the average blog could potentially generate, it seems to me that the more and more people who become 'in it for the money,' the more diluted the ideas and debate will become. I look at the Canadian newspaper industry for example and the downward turn in quality of the Canwest papers for example.
Am I right or wrong?
Any thoughts on this?
UPDATE: It just dawned on me that this kind of turned into a rant against MSM blogs. Out of those, I still only think that a few are read worthy.
Monday, July 11, 2005
blog corporatization
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6 comments:
The same thing was said about BBS years ago, and Blogs may follow the same route as BBS. The medium becomes cluttered with BS Blogs that run as fronts by Corperations in an attempt to provide some honest "impartial" view points (corp astroturf inc.) we will see people turning away from from the Blog sphere. Eventually the hardcore bloggers will remain and will out last the corp. blogger bubble. Much the same way free internet access companies want the way of the dodo (when corp ad execs realized the the ad space they were paying for to support these "free" internet access providers really wasn't increasing sales)
The thing is, the individuals on the net come up with new ideas to view and spread information, and then corps. cherry pick the ideas and use them untill the idea is destroyed or untill the corps have found away to control that segment of the medium. This may happen here as well, or it may not. Personally I don't think it is worth worrying about, people who are looking for information will find it, but it is becoming increasing difficult to sort through as the white noise and bs info that is placed on the web these days. Back a year ago I would never consider using a Blog for an information source, but now I realize that sometimes these blogs are the only keepers of the facts long after they have stopped being news.
I had a non-corporate bloggers blog ri ng a while ago but shut it down due to a lack of interest.
The corp bloggers are just trying to capture attention. They are paid to take their 'print fame' over into the blogosphere in order to regain attention that is being paid to people like daveberta or whoever.
Only 5% of online useres are reading blogs, and the majority of them read 5-6 blogs a day. If they end up being the msm blogs, that's what the msm wants. After paying attention to them for the day, you can't afford to pay attention to the 'lesser' beings.
Zorph: What's BBS?
I agree, it's nothing to be worried about. It just ticks me off how much they tend to dilute things.
Good points.
"Only 5% of online useres are reading blogs, and the majority of them read 5-6 blogs a day. If they end up being the msm blogs, that's what the msm wants. After paying attention to them for the day, you can't afford to pay attention to the 'lesser' beings."
Good point. Scweez out the blogspoters...
Good points to all.
Toronto Tory, I like your point "If this medium is destroyed, we will simply move on to the next medium, whatever it may be (I hope)."
I agree. We will always be ahead of the curve.
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