This morning, a friend sent me a link to the excerpt of an article from Business 2.0 magazine. The thrust—and the title—of the excerpt is Blogging for big bucks; the authors mention some of the known players in the campaign to fulfill blogs' destiny as revenue-generating ventures.
Boing Boing, a four-person operation that bills itself as a directory of wonderful things, is on track to gross an estimated $1 million in ad revenue this year. The digital-media news site PaidContent.org, headquartered in the second bedroom of a Santa Monica apartment, is set to post even more than that.
Boing Boing is obviously a household word in the blogosphere, but in the next paragraph, the focus shifts to a blog that, for some reason, is virtually invisible on the radar of tracking sites like Technorati.
And Fark.com, a site packed with sophomoric humor run by a lone guy in Lexington, Ky., is on pace to become a multimillion-dollar property. In short, some of the most popular blogs, long the bane of the mainstream media, are themselves becoming mainstream.
FARK is a new one to me, so I went over there to have a look. As it turns out, the sophomoric humor label doesn't seem appropriate for this site. With more than the usual number of links to strange and unusual news items, and a tag line that—as you can see from FARK's logo above—disavows any connection to real news, it might be tempting to assign it to that category. But that wouldn't do it justice.
What I like about FARK is the variety, and the choice. There's certainly no shortage of news-aggregating sites on the Web, and a significant number are blogs, but this one is different. While there are news blurbs culled from the usual sources, they're divided into categories such as Not News, Sports, Entertainment, Tech, Politics, Press, Video, and Voting. Within each category, the blurbs are further subdivided with descriptive labels like Obvious, Amusing, Follow Up, Stupid, Weird, Ironic, and Sad, among others. The news items aren't from obscure sources, either; they're familiar names like CNN, ABC, BBC, Fox, Reuters, and a host of big-city newspapers, e.g. the Chicago Sun-Times. So you have serious news, flippant news, and everything between, all in one place. I like!
In typical blog fashion, the reader has the opportunity to comment, and also submit links to news items for inclusion on the site. Apparently, revenue comes from classified ads that appear on the right side of the main page, as well as sponsors. If, as the authors of the article point out, this blog is headed for the multimillion dollar bracket, it means Drew has done more than a couple things right. Personally, I like it for its own sake; it fits my idea of what a blog ought to be. But if it can make a living in the process, so much the better.
Oh, and thanks for that link, Jan!
Your welcome!
ReplyDeleteVery funny.
ReplyDelete