Blogging

chillibreeze writer — Pranay Srinivasan

Webster.com describes the word "blog", a portmanteau for Weblog as a Web Site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks, provided by the writer.

While, largely this is true of most blogs, today, for many of those who decided to bare their lives in some form or another online, to the world, blogging has become a profitable enterprise. Corporations are learning to benefit from it; Advertisers have jumped onto the bandwagon; More and more individuals are learning how to harness the amazing publishing power of the Internet, and use it to showcase their ideas, their talent, their ideas, and their opinions to the world. User-generated content is all set to become the next big thing, as social networking, collaborative input media, niche weblogging, and consumer awareness touches unprecendented levels across the world, creating online interactions friendlier, faster, and more realistic than ever before. This is the new web.

And the superstars of this blogging industry are varied. I have taken some examples of companies who have profited. They include individuals, firms, and corporations.

Blogads was established by Henry Copeland in 2002, to capitalise on the massive advertising potential of blogs that companies could realise for a pittance compared to their ad budgets. When you can run a 3-month Audi campaign, that gets 68 million page views, just by advertising on blogs, for USD 50,000.00 as compared to USD 500,000.00, that is, the rate for a Yahoo.com front page banner for just one day, it suddenly starts making sense. Blogs are smaller, niche offerings that cater to specific groups of people, and are usually interested in the blog in question. Bloggers are more trusted because they're one of us, and not a big company just looking to rip you off. Blogads is an exclusive club of the most successful, and interesting blogs. They share 70% of the ad revenue with the blog-owners, and keep 30% of the revenue to pay for the technology. Blogads is not an entire marketing or advertising strategy but they are increasingly becoming an important part of the larger picture. And its not uncommon for bloggers to get 4 and 5 figure checks every month. Blogads mentions on their website that unless you are a popular blog (1000 visitors a day), and you have been invited by an existing blogads advertiser, you will not be able to sign up. To get to that kind of traffic, inbound links are extremely important as is publicity.

Another company that believes in spreading the joy, is BlogIt. This is a blog hosting company, that differs from others in that it charges a fee from every registrant to write a blog on its website. Reading a blog is free. However, it shares this revenue with the most popular blog-writers, from the pool of registration funds it gets, after keeping a percentage for itself. So if 10 people sign up at USD 20 each, thats $200. But from the 10, if only 3 get read all the time, and the rest of the 10 never get read, that USD 200 gets split between the 3 bloggers. BlogIt also uses advertising on blogs to supplement its own and the blogger's revenue. And the popularity of the top bloggers on BlogIt, not only share revenues from the readership, they will also be noticed outside BlogIt. To measure the popularity of their blog, and to read the most popular and updated blogs, people turn to Technorati.

Technorati is a blog search engine. It indexes, ranks, crawls, and offers you information on the hottest, latest blog posts from around the world. It uses user registrations, and then tracks and crawls their blogs for inbound links, as a measure of popularity. As of date, it crawls around 107.7 million blogs worldwide. It uses advertising to get its revenue, but it also gets its revenue from large companies, and Corporations who use its proprietory software to track changes on blogs internationally about their products, or items, or for news related to their company. In realtime. Technorati is acknowledged as the clearing house for blog-information on the net. Technorati uses its technology to rate all kinds of socially communicative media like blogs, and as they put it, "over 250 million pieces of tagged social media."

That brings us to a similarly exploding medium which are wikis. Wikis are collaborative websites, where anyone can edit the content. If it is a public wiki, anyone can edit it. If its a private wiki, only authorised personnel can edit it. The best known wiki is Wikipedia, the encyclopedia anyone can edit. It is the single largest community wiki online that caters to the entire web, with over 2.03 million articles in English, supported by videos, graphics, research, and detailed information on the topic of choice. And since it is easily editable, it stays current, with news feeds being updated every few seconds. Wikipedia is run by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, started by Jimmy Wales in 2001. It runs on contributions and donations from individuals and companies from across the world. Recently, a trend showed that companies would employ individuals to deliberately edit and amend information spread about them on wikipedia to showcase their positive side, and delete any malicious or suspiciously malicious content that might be online. At the same time they also made changes to their competitor's pages to bring issues that would make their competitor look bad, to the fore.

However, now new companies like JotSpot are creating software online that will allow companies to use their proprietory web services to create, run and host wikis for specific projects, departments, etc, with superior support for attachments, files, etc. This technology has taken the corporate world by storm. Now, instead of exchanging 7 different versions of a file with 15 different colleagues in 12 different cities, you can now just put it up on a wiki, and as soon as someone else updates it, it is online in one place for everyone to see. If someone has an update he needs to send to everyone, all he has to do is update it on the website. Its similar to a collaborative blog. This is a sustained revenue stream, and offers great value. Jotspot has recently been acquired by Google who confirmed on the website that they will no longer be billing clients for the service. Instead they will offer the Jotspot service for free to anyone who needs it.

While Jotspot dealt with wikis for applications, Facebook.com deals with socially shared applications on a web platform between existing friends and contacts. Billed as a social utility, facebook offers blogs, wish lists, scrabble, fist fights, food fights, communities, and much much more, all third party developed applications that use the facebook platform, and can be used to interact with friends, and generally used for fun. Facebook is now using the Adsense program for advertisers from Google to monetize a part of its 30 million user base, but at this stage, is not looking to charge for any of its applications. Currently even the third party developers can host their applications free of charge. However, Facebook has a first mover advantage, and we will be able to see them monetize their user base through the use of branded applications that can use the demographics to their advantage.

All this proves is that blogging can be a very profitable profession, but it works on tenets similar to any other field. Quality of content, popular support, rapid updating, networking, and a lot of talent are what make a blog work. And although at the moment, ad revenue is the major driver for blogging incomes, in the near future, it remains to be seen if syndicated user generated content can live up the major league billing it is being touted as.

Chillibreeze's disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not reflect the views of Chillibreeze as a company. Chillibreeze has a strict anti-plagiarism policy. Please contact us to report any copyright issues related to this article.

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—About our writer:

Pranay is, by his own admission, a jack of all trades. He is working on mastering atleast one of those trades.

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