• by June 8, 2005

VYING FOR A SHARE OF THE ADVERTISING POT, ONE BLOG TRIES IT WITH, WELL, POT -- We have to confess that we're still a bit boggled by blogging, so when we found ourselves in the midst of a group of some of the industry's best-known bloggers this week we felt a little out of our element. We did learn some new things about the emerging micromedia marketplace, but we still came away scratching our heads over just why so many people are doing it, and what the actual business model is behind it. The numbers are impressive: some 10 million blogs are currently being published, according to someone show should know, John Battelle, founder of Wired magazine, The Industry Standard, and now a new venture he claims will establish a sensible business model for bloggers. Not surprisingly, it's an ad-supported one.

Battelle unveiled the new venture this week during MediaPost's OMMA West conference in San Francisco. And this column might have been a scoop, if it were not for a fact that there was a blogger sitting in the front row blogging Battelle's keynote live. "You're blogging me?," Battelle quipped to blogger Jason Calacanis. "I'll blog you back." The exchange demonstrated the kind of new media camaraderie that pervades the blogosphere. It also left us with the impression that a lot of this blogging business is about people blogging to themselves.

Battelle acknowledged as much when he cited another statistic: that there are about 35 million readers of blogs. If you do the math, he said, that nets out to about 3.5 million readers per blog. Not exactly Henry Luce publishing economics. Despite that micro fragmentation, Battelle says those numbers can be deceiving, because the "really good blogs" - which he estimates to be about 10,000 in number - command much higher readership levels than the average. But since they are still too small to captivate Madison Avenue's attention, Battelle said, he formed his new venture - fmpublishing - to do just that: aggregate the best of the blogosphere to generate the kinds of numbers that would get the attention of leading advertisers and agencies.

It's a good idea, but not without its own unique obstacles. For one thing, the kind of ads Madison Avenue typically runs in linear media like TV, radio, newspapers and magazines, may not play with the blog crowd. Equally important: Some of the content published by bloggers may not sit very well with advertisers. Because they are often unfiltered and uncensored, blogs can create some uncomfortable adjacencies for some marketers' messages. That was brought out during a subsequent panel discussion on micromedia, where panelists discussed the merits of an ad for Cheaptickets.com, which showed up on one of Nick Denton's travel blogs about illicit tourist excursions in Amsterdam. But while some of the panelists acknowledged that might have been an awkward environment for the Cheaptickets brand, at least one - Jason Calacanis - thought it was ideal. "People go to Amsterdam to smoke pot," noted Calacanis, who went on to point out that, "The name of the site is Cheaptickets. It sounds like the demographics are ideally matched." We don't know how well Calacanis understands the current market value of "pot," which we've been told was anything but cheap - before or after this week's Supreme Court ruling upholding federal laws that make it illegal in this country - but we got his point.

Meanwhile, fmpublishing's Battelle says he hopes to resolve some of those advertising conflict issues by entering into a dialogue with advertisers and agencies to both develop new forms of advertising and messaging, as well as figuring out ways to prevent potentially negative brand associations that can arise on blogs.