The March Of The Blogs
7.5 million pageviews a month - that’s Boing Boing, one of the five most visited blogs on the Web. Blogs are becoming big business, as shown by Technorati, which indexed more than 106 million blogs as of September 2007, an increase of 12 million than in the previous month.
Any new information source is considered a competitor, and old media is increasingly partnering with bloggers to share both readership and ad revenues. Newspapers, for example, have recently looked to the blogosphere for a larger audience. The New York Times recently joined with the authors of the Freakonomics blog, which comments on economic thinking in everyday situations, and moved it under the Times brand’s online and editorial umbrellas. The blog’s co-author, Stephen Dubner, saw the partnership as an opportunity to work with a renowned newspaper and garner “the readership and support that comes along with it.”
Other traditional media companies are also taking part in the blogosphere. The Houston Chronicle recruited 50 reader-bloggers whose commentary appears on its site. The Washington Post provides a blog roll to its site which includes a directory of links to blogs that specialize in technology, health, and entertainment, among other things. And in 2006, Conde Nast, owner of Wired and other magazines and Web sites, acquired Boston’s Reddit, a social news site.
Apart from that even websites such as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Reuters, etc. use technologies such as Sphere or BlogBurst to show blogs relevant to their articles.
As this article by Standard & Poor questions, are blogs going to be the next takeover target for media companies, in their quest for relevant audience and a business model?
Which are your favourite blogs
Filed under: Business, Media, Trends
[…] the other is the opportunity it offers as a source of income. Moreover, as I had mentioned in this post, even newspapers are looking to the blogosphere for a larger audience with some partnering with the […]