Buy me
: New stuff regarding a few ad efforts for blogs:
: Greg Lindsay writes about John Battelle‘s new venture — which is revealing itself as slowly as a high-class stripper. It’s about acting as an agent to star blogs. With a set of bloggers of a certain size and weight, I think this will work well.
: Meanwhile, Roger L. Simon, Charles Johnson, Winds of Change, and Marc Danziger team up with Tim Oren to start their own ad network. I’m not sure what the ad pitch is for a network of primarily political blogs that tilts strongly starboard but I wish them luck; they’ll be stronger together than apart.
: And every blogger’s friend, Henry Copeland, keeps adding new blog mininetworks, like this one for food. I can’t find the full list; this post comes closest. I think this is the way to go. It’s about gathering critical mass for advertisers.
But we’re not at critical mass yet. And we need to stop viewing this just from our end of the pipe — blogs that like each other or want to work together, whether the lists above or Denton’s or Calacanis’ — and instead, look at it from the advertisers’ end: They want to put together ad hoc networks of blogs that meet their specific goals, which include both targeting and size. We don’t have the means to give that to them. All of which leads me to my predictable pitch:
I believe advertising on citizens’ media — not just blogs but also other text, audio, and video content — will truly explode only when there are more metrics about our medium, more attention to the needs of marketers (e.g., cookies in RSS readers), and an open-source ad call.