the claim is on you
the sights are on me
so what do you do
that's guaranteed?
Steve Maich last week in Macleans:
Will blogs fundamentally change the media business, or any business for that matter? Well, did do-it-yourself wine kits change the wine industry? Think about all the homemade plonk you've had to drink over the years. Sure, everybody thinks the merlot they stirred up in a plastic bucket in their basement tastes fantastic. But try selling it.
An interesting piece, throwing a bit of cold water on the bl0guphoria (If I may coin a word: I googled it [using an "o" instead of "0"] and turned up one reference, which appears to be a dead link. So I claim it for my own.) that seems to be ramping up again. No, bl0gs are not going to displace the MSM, not for a very long time, if ever. That doesn't mean that things aren't changing.
Perhaps tellingly, Maich's tagline:
Read Steve Maich's weblog, All Business
Hedging our bets, are we?
Following the money is always instructive, and serious amounts of it are being sloshed around.
From Instapundit:
Julie Roehm has more than $2 billion to spend this year, and the way she's been spending it worries executives at News Corp., the Washington Post Co., and virtually every other media company on the planet. As Chrysler's director of marketing communications, Roehm, 34, oversees a budget that Advertising Age ranks as the sixth-largest pool of ad dollars in the nation. . . .Roehm rarely misses a chance to talk about how delighted she is with online advertising. Last year she spent 10% of the budget online; this year she is allotting closer to 18%; next year, she says, she will allocate more than 20%. Do the math: In 2006 roughly $400 million of Chrysler's money that used to go into TV, newspaper, and magazine ads will be spent on the Internet. Says Roehm: "I hate to sound like such a marketing geek, but we like to fish where the fish are."
Most of that won't be going to bl0gs, of course; there are plenty of places on the Internet that attract way more eyeballs than even the biggest bl0ggers. But just in case:
Hey, Julie! Over on the left! 20 bucks and it's yours! Discount for two or more months!
As Steve H. notes at Hog On Ice:
Matt Drudge gets about 8.2 million uniques...per DAY. That is a staggering amount of traffic. If you put up a single Amazon link on a site like that, you will make an excellent living, even if you do nothing else. Let's compare Drudge's traffic to a Big Blogger's traffic. Glenn Reynolds gets 120,000 hits per day. And of course, as all bloggers know, a lot of that traffic should be discounted, because it comes from search engine accidents.
Not my traffic, of course. Only 14% of it is from people (or possibly horses) interested in man/horse encounters of the intimate kind. Judging by my email, my readers instead seem to be intensely interested in automotive products.
Hey, Julie!