This weekend, I'm writing a series on Supporting the Blogosphere. The idea is to discuss, in some detail, what needs to be done to support bloggers, and how it can be done. This idea was spurred, in part, by Mike Lux's piece on connecting donors and bloggers on Open Left, which theorized that bloggers need more supportive organizations in order to have a shot at collecting money from donors.
Part 1 of the series focused on services for bloggers - goods, services, know-how, resources, and other things which support bloggers. Part 3 of the series will focus on a variety of organizational models which can be used to deliver blogosphere support.
This post will focus on revenue for bloggers: how bloggers can make money through their blogs, and how a blogosphere support organization could assist them in doing so. I've written about making blogging profitable before, and there will be some overlap with that previous post - but today, I'll focus more sharply on how blogosphere support organizations can help bloggers in pursuing these profit opportunities.
I'm flying dark a little bit in this post - I've never used my blogging for revenue, so there could be parts of this post that are in error. If you're a blogger with a bit more experience in any of these matters, correct me below, and I'll update accordingly.
Advertising
The most obvious form of blogger revenue, and the form which is probably most common throughout the blogosphere, is advertising. Putting advertising on your site, like blogging itself, seems easy at first, but is much more difficult in practice. First, there is the question of which advertising provider to use: BlogAds, Google Ads, or some other party? Next comes the question of how much to charge for ads. Finally, there's the question of where to place the ads on the blog, and how many to display at any one time. Bloggers could use help with all of these questions, and a blogosphere support organization can provide assistance along these lines.
In particular, there appears to be some enthusiasm among bloggers for creating an organization to fix blogging rates at a certain level, in order to avoid a "race to the bottom". Depending on how that's done, it could very well be an illegal cartel, as a MyDD commenter (sorry, can't find the link) has pointed out. I imagine there are ways to get around that problem, though. For example, progressive bloggers could form a competitor to BlogAds, which provides advertising broker services; the broker could simply set a higher floor for advertising rates, and bloggers would be individually free to join or leave it as they see fit. I've harped on this idea a couple of times, and I certainly think there's room for a progressive competitor to BlogAds to emerge; there are any number of opportunities such a competitor could exploit.
Another advertising problem that a blogosphere support organization could tackle is expanding the advertising base, in any number of ways. For example, such an organization could seek to help bloggers solicit ads among local retail businesses; or it could encourage progressive businesses, organizations, and candidates to advertise on progressive blogs. Alternatively, it could provide bloggers with mentorship and how-to guides as they form their own internal "advertising department". Along similar lines, such an organization could help form ties between local newspapers and local bloggers, whereby newspapers act as advertising brokers for local retailers, and bloggers act as low-cost publishers for those ads (I've kicked this concept around before, and there's real money in it - something like $7.5 billion, this year alone).
Furthermore, a blogosphere support organization could help bloggers deal with the "drought" problem - that is, the problem that advertising revenues dry up in off-years. This problem is an accute one within the progressive blogosphere, as off-years - that's the time when candidates and organizations are least likely to spend advertising revenue, which means bloggers spend the time in desparate pursuit of revenue. It's also the best time for the blogosphere to strategize, regroup, plan for upcoming challenges, and assist elected allies in governance. The drought problem means that we are regularly losing important opportunities due to an unfortunate turn of economics. Beyond simply expanding the advertising base to eliminate this problem entirely, a blogosphere support organization can play any number of financial games to reduce the problem - e.g., holding some percent of election year blog revenues in escrow; helping bloggers adjust ad rates appropriately during election season to prepare for lean times; etc.
Finally, a blogosphere support organization can assist bloggers by expanding the kinds of advertising opportunities available to them. These opportunities include cost per action advertising, which I wrote about in June; user-based advertising; sponsored blog posts (aka "post per pay", which is reviled in some quarters); and so on. Such an organization can also help bloggers put together attractive packge deals, tying together (for example) radio, newspaper, and blog ads, using Google Radio Ads and Google Print Ads. In some cases, expanding these opportunities means developing new software, and/or making that software more easily accessible to bloggers; in other, it's merely a matter of creating an advertising product and targeting it to advertisers appropriately.
Speaking engagements and media appearances
Popular progressive bloggers are interesting personalities. Almost by definition, they have an interesting, fresh voice; they are outgoing; they have a following; and, contrary to establishment lore, they are usually not trolls who live in their parents' basements, emerging only occasionally for Cheetos and Dr. Pepper. In short, they have the potential to be excellent public speakers and media personalities. Not all bloggers, but certainly quite a few.
For the most part, this potential goes largely untapped. Bloggers are rarely invited to speak or appear at high-profile occasions or on widely-circulated TV shows. This potential is changing around the margins, certainly: blogger conferences and progressive conferences regularly feature bloggers as speakers; very popular bloggers do make high-profile public appearances occasionally; and, I would suspect, that statewide progressive bloggers are finding their way onto local news shows (I know that's happening in Massachusetts, for example.)
However, there's potential for a much wider range of speaking appearances, including college lectures, campaign or union rallies, TV talk shows, radio talk shows, and progressive business gatherings. In some cases, these missed opportunities which could go to progressive bloggers mean lost revenue, in the form of missed honoraria; in others, they mean indirect lost revenue, in the form of traffic which could be, but is not, generated to the bloggers site. In many cases, these missed opportunities are also problems for the progressive movement as a whole, because they mean missed opportunities to disseminate our ideas.
Blogosphere support organizations can work to tap this potential for speaking opportunities in a number of ways. The idea discussed most frequently for attacking this problem is a speaker's bureau, such as the Blue America Speakers Bureau. Such an organization represents speakers, and helps advertise their speaking services to a variety of venues, usually in exchange for a flat fee or commission. While a full-blown speakers bureau might be difficult or costly to establish, there are other angles on this problem: for example, progressives could form alumni networks which assist bloggers in locating speaking positions at their alma mater. Or progressives could establish a general purpose "speaking engagements and media clips library", which helps bloggers (and other progressive leaders, for that matter) to keep track of their previous speaking engagement and recorded media clips; such a library could be invaluable in proving a blogger's bona fides for future appearances. On the other side of the problem, a blogosphere support organization could provide bloggers with speech and media coaching, helping individuals make the most of the appearances that they do find.
Blogger-for-Hire
Blogger-for-Hire is the way I refer to somewhat rare cases where bloggers solicit donations in order to help them cover the cost of reporting on some event; classic examples include Josh Marshal's reporting on the NH Democratic Presidential primary in 2004, FireDogLake's reporting on the Libby Trial, and Matt Stoller's reporting on the CT Democratic Senate primary in 2006.
I actually don't think there's much to do for blogger support organizations in helping bloggers work out blogger-for-hire arrangements; these cases are fairly rare, and bloggers have been able to use makeshift tools like Paypal successfully when they needed them. However, it is possible that a support organization could formalize the situation somewhat, protecting the blogger's liability, for example; or the support organization could assist bloggers in promoting one another's blogger-for-hire efforts. Another, perhaps more fanciful, possibility is that a support organization could support large-scale blogger-for-hire operations. For example, such an organization could help a group of bloggers work together to hire ten or so reporters, with each one assigned to the beat on each of the Republican presidential candidates' campaigns for the duration of the 2008 campaign. The blogs would then have access to the primary reporting materials, and the reporters' daily written accounts of events on the campaign trail.
Consulting
Consulting is the "gold mine" of progressive blogging - it's the opportunity most likely to help a blogger support herself full-time. Consulting opportunities for progressive bloggers tend to go in one of three directions: paid blogging for a candidate or organization; consulting on a variety of technical issues related to blogging, e.g., launching a new blog, doing design work, etc.; and strategic consulting on reaching out to the blogosphere, engaging with the progressive movement, etc.
There are a variety of opportunities for blogosphere support organizations in this arena. Support organizations can encourage bloggers to take up consulting, and can help them find consulting engagements; they can assist bloggers with the myriad mechanical problems of starting and operating a business - legal needs, accounting needs, etc.; they can help bloggers identify and pursue new business opportunities; and they can connect bloggers with one another and with other progressive consultants and entrepreneurs, thereby forming a mentorship network. (My company's entry into the BlogPAC entrepreneur contest was along these lines, for what it's worth - we proposed a matchmaking service for progressive freelancers and local and state house progressive campaigns.)
Consulting is an interesting revenue stream, because a successful consultant/blogger doesn't need a particularly large audience in order to build a good consulting business. She just needs a well-targeted audience who trusts her and accepts her authority, and she needs to encourage her audience to engage her services. In fact, bloggers who can dominate a particular niche might be the most likely to capture related consulting opportunities. For example, a blogger who is considered authoritative on bicycle-friendly policies in the Boston area might be the most likely candidate to gain a consulting engagement with a company that wishes to market its products to Boston bicyclists. Such a blogger would not need a particularly large audience, just one large enough to spread the word within the Boston bicyclist community about her expertise. Consequently, a blogosphere support organization which identifies topics where the progressive blogosphere doesn't have particularly good coverage, and which recruits a blogger to cover that area, could be well-suited to help the blogger provide related consulting engagements.
For the most part, consulting as a method of supporting full-time bloggers is still a bit of a pipe dream. There are probably a very small number of consulting engagements awarded to bloggers on the basis of their blogging, and most of these are probably reserved for the most popular bloggers. It remains to be seen whether supporting consultant/bloggers is really an idea worthy of major investment.
Information stream consulting
Information stream consulting is a special case of consulting which I think every good blogger is capable of doing, and doing very well, and which very few bloggers consider a marketable commodity. That's a real shame, and I'd like to see it change, somehow or another.
Information streams are both the raw materials, and the products, of blogging. Information streams consist of RSS feeds; email lists; newspaper stories; periodically-published reports by advocacy groups; voterfiles, birth registers, and other sets of public documents; and any number of other occasionally-updated sources of information. Every imaginable topic, no matter how small, has a potentially enormous set of information streams. Good bloggers will locate the information streams relevant to their topic area, separate the good streams from the bad, and will quickly identify those streams which are most likely to be the source of good blog posts. There are a variety of technological tools for doing that, including blog readers and email filtering (which allows a blogger to efficiently subscribe to dozens or hundreds of email lists). New tools, like Yahoo Pipes and Google Trends, are adding entirely new dimensions to this technological toolbox. My guess is that progressive bloggers, as a whole, haven't really grasped the power of these tools yet.
Regardless, the point is that good bloggers are experts in information streams, and that this expertise can be put to use in a variety of ways by progressive clients. Information stream consulting can be a good way of doing opposition research, or efficiently discovering weaknesses in an opposition canadidate's campaign. It can be a good way for businesses to find new clients. It can help legislators identify new trends and ideas which are relevant to public policy.
In some ways, this idea is very old. Consider the simple example of advertisements that comes in a change of address form booklet from the post office. These advertisements are there because someone realized that the information stream of "people filling out post office change of address forms" was very valuable to certain retail businesses (like hardware stores, furniture stores, etc.), and encouraged those stores to advertise in the booklet. Along similar lines, I once heard a Democratic party activist explain, at a public workshop, how her town committee checks the voterfile every month for new 18-year-old registrants, and sends them a post card encouraging them to join the committee.
There has recently been an explosion in the number of information streams available, and I think many companies and non-profits are slow to catch on. I also think bloggers, although they tend to be experts in information streams, don't realize how valuable their expertise potentially is.
A blogosphere support organization could set about fixing this problem, on both sides: encouraging bloggers to enlist as information stream consultants, and encouraging progressive businesses, campaigns, organizations, and other entities to hire this new class of consultants. This is a rather abstract idea, and one which is foreign to many organizations, so I imagine that drumming up clients would be the most difficult task. Fortunately, I think there are some information streams whose usefulness is obvious and easily grasped (for example, the case of 18-year-olds in the voterfile), and I imagine that would be a good place to start with the advertising.
Coming up next...
This post and my previous post, on services for bloggers, have together suggested an enormous laundry list of tasks for blogosphere support organizations. There is no way any one organization could tackle all of these tasks. It's possible that some of these tasks are really bad ideas which don't even deserve to be tackled at all.
In the next post, I'll discuss the kinds of institutional resources we will need to tackle some of these tasks, and how such institutions could be created, assuming that there are founders with sufficient interest to do so. I'm under no illusions that most, or event a significant number, of these ideas will be enshrined in sustainable organizations any time soon, but I hope to inspire bloggers and entrepreneurs to think seriously about what their role could be in turning some of these ideas into reality.
