According Karen Holt’s “And Now, For A Little Bloggery” in Folio, the time may be right for magablogs—magazine weblogs—as both a brand enhancer and a source of revenue.
“For now, magazine blogs tend to work as brand enhancements, not as moneymakers. ‘It is another way for us to get our name out there in a different venue, the blogosphere, and try to become part of that conversation,’ says Amy Bernstein, senior editor at Business 2.0, which launched its first blog, B2day, in January. ‘It runs on a completely different heartbeat from a monthly magazine, and it gives us an opportunity to respond to events on a daily, hourly, minute-by-minute level.’ B2day is open to postings from any member of the magazine’s editorial staff.”
Although some magazine weblogs are beginning to show signs of revenue life:
“At The American Prospect, a blog called Tapped, by Matthew Yglesias and Nick Confessore, reaches a whole network of computer users who might never otherwise visit the magazine’s site, says executive editor Michael Tomasky. Now the magazine is experimenting with political advertising on the blog. ‘We decided that the time was right with election season upon us,’ says Tomasky. Yglesias, who also runs his own blog independent of Tapped, says he took ads for the first time in March and brought in about $1,000 in revenue.”
Holt goes on to write that direct sponsorship is culturally incompatible with the weblog community. She bases this on a 2003 survey by Blog Search Engine that found “only 13 percent of the sites take advertising and half of the 610 bloggers surveyed said blogs and ads don’t mix.”
Magazines—both mainstream and alternative—should be exploring stand-alone micro-publication niches that complement their core print publications. Non-invasive direct sponsorships of these online nanopublications will be enormously successful for everyone involved. Time’s a-wastin’ and it’s only a question of who’s going to be first and who’s going to get the business model right.
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