When blogs go bye-bye.

Even worse: If he/she's the head blogger, how many people are working under him/her?

 

Of course, that's been true for more than a decade now, close to two in some circles. If old media is just now getting "worried" about this, and yeah, some are still figuring it out ... whew. So far behind the curve it ain't funny.

 

Companies are using their Web sites and digital out-of-home advertising like projecting on building walls because they are gradually coming to this conclusion-they don't need media advertising. Not just newspapers, any of it.

 

I know nobody likes to hear this, but it makes you wonder why those companies ever agreed to pay such insanely high advertising rates in the first place.

Were they ever benefiting from having a middle man in the process, even in the pre-Internet days? Or could their marketing efforts have been just as successful if they had spent the same amount of money on reaching people directly instead?

And yeah, I know it pays the bills ... I'm just wondering, from a conceptual standpoint. I've always kind of thought advertising, as a concept, was kind of a scam. Maybe that's just me.

 

I don't know about benefiting, exactly.

But the trick for companies, even with direct-from-their-site marketing, was figuring out how to make sure, and know, that people would be prompted to click on and see their ads in the first place? And how many would do so?

That element of internet surfing and choice is still the wild card, one that I think was always less wild with newspapers.

 

Companies have always had toll-free hotlines for people to call and places to send letters. Those letters were opened and read by someone. To add another person to do a blog or maintain a company site isn't exactly new.

 

QFT.

 

My fave is the Turkey Hotline, talking people in off the ledge every November. Cripes, it is like roasting a chicken, only bigger.

 

FWIW, Hopkins jumped the shark this spring when he hore a $2,000/day bodygaurd to accompany him to the Gannett stockhoulders meeting in Virginia.

Content value of his blog had already greatly diminished in the two months leading up to that episode, and it's gotten much worse since.

 

Sort of related, sort of not, but I've just been reading a bit about the blowup at Deadspin. They apparently eliminated a bunch of people from commenting, and there's been an apocalyptic response on many blogs, which is pretty amusing. And a bunch of the executed are threatening to create a rival site, unoriginally called spindead. Oooooooooh.

Here's a few links about it.

http://www.spartyandfriends.com/?p=14764

http://sportingmadness.blogspot.com/2009/06/on-ground-deadspins-aj-daulerio-speaks.html

 

BuckW: John Wanamaker, founder of the department store chain of the same name, said way back in the day that "I know half of what I spend on advertising is wasted. I just don't know which half." That uncertainty kept advertising a prosperous business, but the amazing amount of research data generated by the Internet and the new applications for television such as DVRs mean advertising may get so good at measuring its effectiveness, it'll research itself out of existence.

 

I'd have to agree with everyone here. The thing though that I kind of worry about is this though, to most people who aren't in the internet "know" so to speak, all they know are the "blogs" and not the genuine news sites that are out there.

In other words, is the death of the blogs a problem for internet journalism?

I think as long as free blogging sites like blogger.com and wordpress are still around, "blogs" will still be made, but the question is, what is the proper gauge of a blog's popularity compared to an actual "news" site?

If say, FaithandFearInFlushing.com gets more hits than say NYSportsDay.com that might make you wonder about the future of online journalism though.

As FaFiF has two great writers covering the Mets, you really can't call them "journalists" in the true media sense. Oh they write well, and the content is fresh and relevant, helps that both writers are from the journalism field (hell, one of them just came out with a book by the same name), but Jay Horowitz isn't going to be handing them credentials anytime soon. On the flip side, how is the actual news site, with credentialed reporters covering sporting events, NYSportsDay.com doing in relation to the fan blog FaithAndFearInFlushing.com in terms of name recognition and such?

I guess the underlying question is, if the popular sites that are done for literally free, by writers that are essentially doing it as a hobby, rather than a job, are going away, while the lesser known sites where the coverage is their job (no clue about pay structure at NYSportsDay or ProFootballTalk.com or any other unaffiliated (with a league or another media entity) news sites) may be struggling to just get their name out there. What does that say about the future of the "next step" of the industry?