Blog News Watch

Rising of blog popularity and migration of millions of readers, making blogosphere blooming. Naturally blogosphere is attracting marketers, advertisers thus business models are building up around it. For marketers and advertisers this is the cheapest way to reach millions together with the global reach. Most common blog business models are:-

Ads selling model: This is most common and popular business model observed around the blogosphere. Earning revenue by selling ads space on blog; contextual or static. Google’s Adsense, YPN, textlinkads are most popular ads providers. This model is very simple like conventional ads in newspaper or per click ad space are sold. Most general cases are blogger got paid for clicked ads, but there are also ad spaces per month rental basis. The second type of ads is mostly noticed in high traffic blogs, where blogger enter into a contract of displaying certain ads for a certain period.

Referral model: Along with Ads selling model this referral model is also widely popular, especially Amazon referral. In this type of model blogger refer certain products or services and get paid if someone purchases through his/her referral links. It can be a simple text link referral or graphical advertisement referral.

Selling/Flipping model: The idea of selling blog isn’t that common, but observed every now and then in blogosphere. The most notable example of this model would be Weblog Inc., which is a establish blog network sold to Netscape/ AOL for nearly US$25 million. Another famous sale was Blog Herald which was sold to BlogMedia inc. by b5Media. This kind of sale usually too place in eBay or in Sitepoint like places. This is becoming very popular day by day, but very few blogger has been successful. I noticed only established and high traffic blogs get sold, so if any of you blogger wish to adopt this model I will suggest target first to build up a quality blog. When you already have a blog with high traffic and few hundred loyal readers, you can sell it.

Charity/ Donation Model: This is not really a business model, rather you can say it an extra money model. Since I have seen very few blog now a days practice it, due to several reason and it doesn’t really give that kind of money.

Product/Service model: A lot of blog I have seen practice and adopted this kind of model. In this model, blogger sell his/her own merchandise (T-shirt, pen, Cap, CD’s- own signature stuffs), books/e-books, paid subscriptions, consultancy and professional services. You can adopt this successfully only if you have serious number of loyal readers who are crazy about your writing. Professional service is different, you need to have some professional expertise in order to offer that, like- web design, blog design, legal advice, SEO advice etc.

Blog Network model: This model is I guess the second most popular model on blogosphere. If you have means and funds you can start your own blog network and hire bloggers to write, and naturally collect money from sponsors. But I think you need a lot more than means and wealth in order to success in Blog Network venture, since there are many (you will need strong management skills, business oversight etc.). Alternatively you can join a blog network as a writer (Just like my case here) and earn money (by ad revenue percentage or fixed salary).

Paid posting model: This model is very new and most controversial business model around blogosphere. In this model bloggers get paid for blogging certain products, services, or organization (usually putting a URL link to their site and talking good stuffs about them or their products). The marketers get contract with different organizations for certain number of blog posts with links for certain amount, when blogger complete post(s) marketer pay a lump sump to blogger and the rest remain as their profit. The real controversy of this kind of model is question the credibility of blogger for advertising within blog post without disclosing. Regardless of controversy a lot of company is popping up with this model, since bloggers get paid quick (usually $5-$15 per post) which is much more lucrative than ads space selling. Though some of these companies are now allowing bloggers to disclose the post as sponsored post.

Crowdsourcing model: This model is entirely new, just popping up in few corners of blogosphere. This model is for collecting news, information, and consumer’s opinions and uses that for commercial purposes. Recently few US newspapers reveal their plan to adopt this kind of model for their news sourcing. In my opinion that day is not so far when collected data, opinion and news through blog will be bought by Medias to enrich their contents due to its global reach.

There are some more blog business models which you may find around blogosphere, but these are the most commonly and successfully adopted so far.

Please feel free to bring it to my attention, if you think i miss something or should something be added in this article.

blog business model, business perspective, blog as a business, blogging biz