Pajamas Media Redux, Weblog Network Revenue Models Compared
October 27, 2005
Darren Rowse of Problogger points to a wired article on the new Coalition of the Willing in Political Blogs. 
From the Wired article:
Pajamas Media has signed up 70 bloggers including Instapundit.com’s Glenn Reynolds, CNBC’s Lawrence Kudlow and Pamela from Atlas Shrugs. The site, which will officially launch Nov. 16 under a different name, will highlight different blogs each day alongside top news headlines.
While they were founded by some big names in the political blogging arena, they also some members in the non-political spectrum, such as Monolo the Shoeblogger.
It would seem that there are three basic models for Weblog Networks (examples follow each type):
1. Centrally Owned Content Network - i.e. more of a traditional media network that could in theory be acquired in part or whole by another entity.
Weblogs Inc. (obviously this worked pretty well, to the tune of $30 Million or so on revenues of ~ $1-3M yearly), Gawker, and Niner Niner.
2. Network Ad Brokering Model - wherein each site is owned by its respected creators and the “federated” ad network sits in the middle, taking a slice of the ad revenue.
Federated Media Publishing - which has the fabulous Boing Boing and 43 Folders in its network.
With backers like John Battelle (co-founder of Wired) and Omidyar Network, I don’t think they’ll have any troubling taking off in a major way.
3. Glorified Link Exchange Model
Huffington Post, 9rules, etc.
As Jeremy Wright commented on the Problogger link:
Just sounds like one big-assed blog aggregator. Not sure how it’s a “network” or even a “new network” in any way…
But, with the names behind it they’ll undoubtedly “succeed” - just not in a way that’ll help average bloggers whatsoever.
Of course, the kicker is… your readers don’t care.
They just want great content.
A Word Abour Rotating YPN and Adsense
October 13, 2005
On his blog, Tim explains why rotating YPN and Adsense ads can be a bad idea, at least if you make them rotate them more often than every few hours or so. I’ve never attempted myself to do that, but it’s always a good thing to keep such little tricks in mind—if only because they can help you generate more revenue, prevent you from committing mistakes that can make you lose money, or, worse comes to worst, put you in violation of the TOS.
My YPN ads were not targeted as well towards the content on the site. I was getting lots of ads for Comcast, LendingTree, and Vonage. So I added these three sites to my Ad Blocking list and waited the two days recommended by the FAQs… however the ads still remained.
[…]
So the next logical question was why am I getting PSAs on YPN? After having a few of the YPN engineers look at my site they figured out the reason it was getting PSAs was because I was rotating pageviews between YPN ads and AdSense ads. Basically the YPN bot that crawls pages to determine the content was getting confused because the page content was constantly changing and the YPN ads were there one second and gone the next. So each time a YPN ad was displayed it triggered a new “content review” and PSAs would be displayed.
An interesting read, and one I’ll keep in mind if someday I’m to rotate ads as well on my blogs.
A New Ad Program
October 12, 2005
