Challenges ahead as commercial blogs take off

Blogging is having a profound impact on the traditional publishing world, but creating a commercial publishing model centring on blog content is problematic, according to experts speaking at the Les Blogs, Blogs and Social Software Conference at the Senat in Paris today.

Chairing the panel debate on nano-publishing and vertical blogging, Dominique Busso, chief executive at VNUnet Europe, asked about the knotty problem of paying bloggers.

And Gaby Darbyshire, of Gawker Media, warned that commercial blogging firms must tread very carefully when creating a business model that places advertising with blog content.

"Most people want to get paid and one thing that people always say is that there is no barrier to entry in creating a blog. Anyone can do it," she said.

"Revenue share does not work, and one of the reasons is that it blurs the distinctions between editorial and advertising.

"You need to pay writers so they can see their success. At Gawker we offer a guaranteed salary but also a bonus based on page view growth."

Jason McCabe Calacanis, of WeblogsInc, said that his company had not been successful in its attempt to pay its bloggers via a revenue split.

"We tried a revenue split as we didn't have money ourselves, but that concept was only attractive to one in 20 writers," he said. "Then we switched to a model similar to Gawker's and we just paid people."

However, McCabe Calacanis warned that centring a commercial web publishing model on page impressions alone is a risky strategy.

"If you pay people based on traffic they are going to write to the lowest common denominator, which is scary for me," he said.

"We have bloggers who make as little as $100 and some [who] make $3,000-$4000 for two to 40 hours a week."

Miklos Gasper, of Blogads, explained that the potential for selling advertising placed with blog content is problematic but potentially lucrative.

"Advertisers think that blogs are for kids. But some 75 per cent [of bloggers] are over 30 and 43 per cent have a family income over $90,000 per year," said Gasper.

"More than two thirds of blog readers are categorised as 'influential', and more than a fifth of blog readers are bloggers themselves. They are attractive in that they are influential and they are opinion makers."

However, Stow Boyd, of Corante, added: "A lot of the people involved within the blog sphere are not in it to make money at all."