• Marketwatch, Monday, March 26, 2007 10:34 AM

Rocketboom founder Andrew Baron says ad revenue just isn't doing it for the popular tech news video blog. The site, which averages 200,000 downloads per day, seven days a week, simply doesn't attract a large enough audience for advertisers that want to blast their commercials to millions. So Baron says Rocketboom is again toying with the idea of charging for its content, an idea many Web publishers seem to be revisiting.

Haven't consumers shown that they don't want to pay for content? Hasn't the proliferation of shared information sites like Digg and user-generated content in general proved that? It seems that there's far too much content out there to justify charging consumers--unless, of course, you're offering content of the same caliber as The Wall Street Journal or The Financial Times (most of which is free anyway).

"If we had 5% of our audience paying $5 a month that would be $50,000," Baron muses, though he vacillates. Blogging, after all, is not journalism, nor is it held to the same standard as commentary from a respected news publication. So what about product placement? Baron worries that might "devalue the integrity of the audience." What, then, is a blogger to do?

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