Bloggasm

Though it seems natural that online advertising would slow during a down economy, we’re seeing signs that it will never reach the lucrative stature that the print industry has known for years. Blogads CEO Henry Copeland told me a few months ago that when it comes to highly-trafficked blogs, there’s too much supply and not enough demand. The ease of entry not only for publishing, but for entering the ad market as well — Adsense, affiliate links, etc. — has created an overabundance for cheap advertising, dividing it up into millions of $5 morsels that do very little for individual bloggers and take away advertising dollars from the bigger players.

This is not to say that content is worthless, but that people are having to find alternate ways of monetizing their sites. Bloggasm, for me, is a loss leader to sell my digital PR services, and we’re finding that more and more bloggers are using their blogs to make connections within their fields, leading to more lucrative jobs and contracts.

This creates a dilemma for many mainstream journalists, however, because of the ethics concerns that would arise if they used their content to promote paying gigs. We saw this with the Washington Post salons a few weeks ago. But still, journalists like Chris Anderson and Malcolm Gladwell have turned their celebrity journalism status into well-paying speaking gigs, and likely many lower level journalists have enjoyed at least some prosperity from the connections they’ve made through their journalism. But though this may solve a problem for the journalist, what does it do for the news organization?

For them, it’s simply a matter of clawing for smaller and smaller sums in advertising dollars.

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