I wanted to weigh in on the whole Why Blog Networks Died conversation. I feel a bit of gratitude is owed to Paul Scrivens by me. Yes, I’m sucking it up and saying thank you. He taught me a lot through the years. We don’t always agree. However I think he’s spot on here. You have to develop one big site and slowly branch out. The long tail is great if you arent creating the content however.
b5media and 9rules have had their clashes and I think a lot of that is because each of them wanted to be the next big thing in the blog network space. Now they are both evolving. 9rules having gone the way of a bloggers community, and b5 having gone the way of the long tail machine.
While 9rules doesn’t pay their bloggers. B5 pays their bloggers using an algorithm like this “$100 a month plus $1.50 for every 1,000 pageviews“. Using this algorithm 901am would be making $1250 dollars this month. Minus the fact that I don’t pay my bloggers using any scale like this,that’s pretty cheap. In fact so cheap that you could be making more if you started your own blogs, hosted them yourselves and spent a lot of time networking within various communities. Don’t get me wrong, I’m friends with a handful of b5ers I just think they should look at ways of progressing their model a bit more to reward bloggers.
Luckily 9rules has no promises of rewarding their bloggers so I can’t say much about them concerning monetization. The reason the blog network space is largely void of leadership is because of the lack of good monetization. Likewise the reason its void of monetization is because of a lack of leadership.
My advice to anyone wanting to start a blog network: Start with one big site and branch out nice and slowly.
Originally posted on February 26, 2007 @ 2:57 am