DISQUS

Svetlana Gladkova · 1 year ago

Interesting take on the entire dilemma, Louis. I think everyone will agree that all the bloggers doing it for a living have a very different style from those doing it out of passion and I think I'd really appreciate the opportunity myself to indulge in blogging without caring about traffic completely. But since it is very different and we don't seem to live in an ideal blogosphere world, I think we will continue to see exclamations like that from Marshall complaining about failing to achieve the financial goals even if we are quite happy with the conversations with a handful of our most loyal readers (along with those bragging about how great our results are when they are great). Or maybe we will see a totally new ad network launched that will cater to bloggers' needs and provide sufficient income without demanding pageviews - until then we'll have to stick to this blogosphere in its current (rather pitiful) state.

Louis Gray · 1 year ago

Svetlana, I don't know that ads are the answer. For the top 1 percent of blogs, like TechCrunch and RWW, you might have the chance to make some good money, but beyond that, the CPMs are sure to be lower, and the costs of people remain the same. Techmeme is one of the best, clear, blog-like sites to have a good business model. Its sponsors pay thousands per month to be highlighted, and I don't believe the cost basis is overwhelming. But it's a rare site that can pull it off. Maybe as blogs mature toward that of old media, you'll start to see salaried, hourly positions with clear performance expectations that would let folks focus on the quality of posts not just traffic.

Svetlana Gladkova · 1 year ago

Louis, very true, ads are only viable for a tiny portion of blogs but I am sure that smaller blogs will continue looking for other solutions. Sponsorships (similar to that on Techmeme - which is obviously a very sustainable model) may be the answer for many blogs but it will take some time for more advertisers to realize they could use blogs advertising for their business. Right now the majority of advertisers prefer the hassle of working with every single blog on a case by case basis to comfort of paying higher to an ad network. But hopefully this will be changing – it just should take time. And of course there are always other money sources, like consulting – a very popular thing among many tech bloggers.

charlieanzman · 1 year ago

Louis - I think you've read my current thoughts on the 125 x 125 ad model and blog SEO. This is a good piece. Potentially a wake-up call for many. Bloggers need to be thinking outside the box. 30-50% of the traffic should be coming from search. Monetization, in my humble view, will be coming more and more from from sponsorships of excellent products and less from CPC. Websites in many verticals, as opposed to blogs, are a completely different story and continue to do well with ads. Some thought should be given (if someone's launching or re-writing) to offsetting a website with a blog for current content. Social Networking will only take these sites so far, especially in the space you're referring to.

Just my two cents.

Keep it comin'
Charlie

Louis Gray · 1 year ago

Social media sites can drive a significant percentage of traffic, but they can't be the only thing driving traffic. Over time, FriendFeed has grown to be my #1 non-Google referrer, and it's delivering a high percentage of sharp, engaged readers. I think every blogger would like to turn their hobby into a paid relationship where they could turn a profit, but I would hope the origin of why they started blogging doesn't change.

charlieanzman · 1 year ago

No argument Louis. Writing to your audience in mind is No.1. That is where the 'excellent product' (above) starts and grows. Formatting the copy to be easily recognized by search engines for specific phrases and search terms equals free advertising over time. PS: Great to see the ongoing dialog in the comments here.

felix · 1 year ago

Very nice post and I agree that there is a big difference from a professional blogger and one who blogs for "fun". In some ways it's the difference between cable tv and public television. But I disagree that this is an either or proposition page views v. discussion. You want both, you want a broad distribution (i.e. page views) because that promotes a wider view and greater audience to participate in the discussion.

If you had the same group of people, however smart they are, who would discuss the topics, this is great because it's good to have a lively discussion. But what a lot of the social media links and a lot of miscellaneous blog links provide is a lot more perspecitives, which I think is really valuable to a conversation.

CraigK · 1 year ago

It's not a surprise that the whole blogging world is being taken over by a more corporate world based around revenue, deadlines, page visits, etc. That's how the world works. Bloggers worrying about monetizing on their posts opposed to worrying about quality content and engaging discussion would be to compare them to musical artists. A lot of bands have a nice following and produce quality music in their genre but then "sell out" to reach a wider audience and to make more money. Whether or not the quality slips is subjective but I think the trend you see with bloggers is only the beginning, and they are only going to become more business like as opposed to a way to have conversation which was the original idea.

Craig
www.budgetpulse.com

Robert Seidman · 1 year ago

Is there really a debate or are people just being silly? Page views matter more than conversation unless your conversations are generating a lot of pageviews! there are sites where that certainly happens, but not very many as a %.

It seems quite often there is huge convergence between blogging out of passion and blogging for a living to the point where it's hard to tell the difference. Many of the most successful at blogging for a living originally were blogging out of passion. Louis, you may be blogging out of passion, but it still helps you professionally -- even if you are not blogging for a living. There are a lot of shades of gray (no pun intended!) here.

If you write about the same stuff that 10,000 other sites are writing about, of course the competition is going to fierce! And I think Charlie Anzman is right: you can only get so far via social media. If you need to rely on social media for traffic, that's probably not sustainable over the longer term.

Louis Gray · 1 year ago

Page views only matter more than conversation if you let them. I'd rather have some regular folks who come back and spur discussion, ideas and introduce me to new technology than get a one-day high caloric sugar rush from reaching the Digg front page.

Robert Seidman · 1 year ago

I should've been more specific. Page views matter more to anyone who is trying to make a living off their blog. I agree, if that's not the case they only matter more if you let them!

Still, even for those trying to make a living from their blogs, I think there are more important priorities than focusing on getting the Digg home page. it's just an opinion, but even if you do prioritize pageviews, prioritizing them via traffic from Digg, etc. in the longer-term is not necessarily the route to building sustainable traffic from repeat visitors (which wind up amounting to a lot of page views).

Even when monetizing the traffic is an objective, having fun should (I think) also be a goal. For me, it's a lot more fun when there's dialog, not only between reader and blogger, but between the readers themselves.

Ari Herzog · 1 year ago

Robert, you are correct that if 10,000 sources have the same or similar content, the uphill battle to be on top will be slow.... but by the same token, competition is healthy. As long as people are talking about other people, linking to each other, and providing unique perspective, thereby narrowing the battlefield and strengthening the social fabric, how are 10,000 perspectives on the same topic a bad thing?

Webomatica · 1 year ago

My blog would be exactly the same without ads. It's a hobby, and I value the freedom of it not being a business. The biggest benefit: whatever I write about is what I genuinely think and am passionate about, not what I think advertisers - or even readers - would like me to write about. I wouldn't sell that freedom for any pile of ad cash.

Louis Gray · 1 year ago

Jason, you're one of the lucky ones. I respect those folks who can take a hobby and turn it into their career and passion, but as we know, there are compromises. So far, I've been lucky enough to not be pushed into the page views race. Visits are great, but conversations and ideas are greater.

Richard MacManus · 1 year ago

Interesting post Louis. Of course this is something I think about a lot, so I'd like to add my 2 cents. I wrote about 99c worth here btw: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/mixed_mess...

You're quite right that if money wasn't part of the equation, there would be a change in the content you see in blogs like RWW. When I first started blogging, and I've noted many times that I started it as a hobby and it was a good 2-3 years before RWW got decent revenue, I did it out of passion for the topic (web tech). Over time it's grown into a publishing business, and that's how I think of RWW today. And yes, the almighty page view is still very important in earning revenue. Until advertising models like CPA (cost per action) become viable, CPM (cost per impression) will continue to be the main way any web property (blogs or otherwise) make money.

But I think it's vitally important for a successful (in many ways) blog to have writers who are passionate about their topics. So I would argue that all of RWW's writers are still very passionate about what we write and we do it because we love web technology. I don't see much difference between many pro and 'hobby' bloggers in that regard, tbh. The main difference is that we *also* need to consider what type of posts do well in page views, comments, etc. So the passion becomes necessarily mixed in with more business-type decisions.

Having said that PV are still important, I do think more can be done by sites like RWW to find other ways to 'monetize'. e.g. I admire a site like paidcontent, which showed that you can become very profitable by mixing the page view model with more niche targeted services (events, reports etc). PaidContent is not the most traffiked blog on the web by any stretch, yet it sold for more than Ars Technica -- which is a heavily traffiked blog. There has to be a lesson in that.

Anyway, nobody knows the answers to these things, we're all learning as we go along :-)

Louis Gray · 1 year ago

Richard, appreciate your detail here. We are all learning as we go
along, and I'm glad you've taken the opportunity to write about it and
be transparent in your thinking. RWW is an interesting pro blog as
it's clear your authors are enthusiastic, and active in the
microcommunities around the blog itself, talking to readers wherever
they may be.

That said, I think we also know what types of posts can generate page
views, and often it takes sensationalism. I found back in the March -
May timeframe that being more aggressive in headlines and wordage
would deliver many backlinks and page views, but that wasn't the type
of writer I really wanted to be. It felt like cheating. After a while,
I started to get e-mails on Thursday asking what the week's "b-meme"
was going to be. So I made a conscious decision to be less
inflammatory and more even keel, and I think, that while page views
are lower than they would be otherwise, we're better for it, and we've
found a different set of peers.

Maybe some day a model will arrive so that bloggers can be salaried,
and not driven by the ads and page views. And I know many folks would
like to turn their hobbies into their career, so blogging is very
attractive to some folks. Just keep doing what you're doing and keep
thinking about it and we'll be watching and participating.

Richard MacManus · 1 year ago

Louis, yes agree that sometimes the line between good content and 'doing it for the page views' is a difficult one. As an example, I wrote a post on Chrome's impact in Enterprise at end of last week. I wrote it late Friday night in a fairly exhausted state and tbh it wasn't one of my better posts. I thought the topic was a worthy one, and I also thought it might generate interest on techmeme etc. However I poorly executed the post and I got hammered in the comments for what was perceived to be a sensationlist type headline: "Chrome Not Ready For Enterprise". Actually, the comments to that post were more worth reading than the post itself. So yes, sometimes blogs do produce stuff under the pressure of getting PV.

Thanks for the interesting conversation, I think about this stuff a lot and ironically probably don't discuss it enough with others.

gregorylent · 1 year ago

discuss it with both your readers and your advertisers .. both will benefit from evolved thinking, and a side effect will be that rww does too

marykathleenflynn · 1 year ago

I'm with you, Louis.

My favorite thing about being a technology reporter is "engaging in conversations about technology, trends, and business, and providing commentary, while learning from smart folks around the Web," as you put it.

The last six weeks I've been having an amazing time interviewing interesting people about the new immediacy in online communications, what John Borthwick of Betaworks calls the "Now Web."

In addition to Borthwick and his Betaworks co-founder Andy Weissman, I've talked with Union Square Ventures' Fred Wilson, Twitter's Biz Stone, FriendFeed's Paul Buchheit and Seesmic's Loic LeMeur.

If you're interested, check out my stories based on those interviews at
http://www.thedeal.com/techconfidential/behind-...

Okay, that was a shameless plug.

But how else to continue the conversation? :)

Regards,
Mary Kathleen Flynn
Senior Editor/Senior Video Producer
The Deal & Tech Confidential

Ralf Scharnetzki · 1 year ago

John Boyd described what (also) blogging can contribute to the world long before "blogging" was invented:

"Live the instinctive see-saw of analysis and synthesis across a variety of domains, or across competing/independent channels of information, in order to spontaneously generate and share new mental images or impressions that match-up with an unfolding world of uncertainty and change."

Those dedicating their life to fight the war for attention are part of our reality but the long term value of their contribution is limited.
See some background info about Boyd here: http://www.line-of-reasoning.com/issues/the-ess...

PatriciaJ · 1 year ago

Thoughtful post. I always appreciate when someone takes my own unformed thoughts and analyzes them for me. I use to post for love of writing, now I still love to write but it is for a company. It is a quandry.

Cath Lawson · 1 year ago

Hi Louis - I find it all too confusing. On the one hand - I'm pleased that I get a decent amount of page views per visitor and also a lot of commenters, I'm really not sure about accepting too many ads on my blog. Folk are bound to cut back on advertising due to this recession, so it would be risky to become too reliant on it. Then again, it would be nice to get the ad money.

Louis Gray · 1 year ago

I have been a vocal opponent to services that are advertising-only. I
think that route is the easy way, and one that's short sighted in a
world when people are increasingly moving to ad-blocking software, and
choosing to ignore advertising altogether. I would hope that those
people who are content producers do so because they have news to
share, enjoy their craft and have unique insight, rather than tweaking
their content to attract more ad dollars.

For me, it is about the conversation. I recognize that I do view the
stats to get a good idea as to what's working, but you will not find
me hyping my stories, begging for Diggs and Stumbles. I believe that
if those happen, they should come naturally.

clerical jobs · 3 weeks ago

What an interesting question: how many of us would keep blogging if money wasn't coming in? My answer would truely be that I would stop. However, I do have 2 blogs and I rarely visit them. I work more on web sites and static information. I wish there was a utopia that you describe, because Google's search results disappoint me again and again. I often think of building my own search engine. Scary thought.