Ensight – Jeremy Wright

Alright, since I don’t blog very often, I end up commenting on stuff in the middle of the conversation that’s happening. So, to recap:

1. GigaOm bought jkOnTheRun. Good move. TechCrunch painted  it as the start of a trend… Y’know, one that started 4 years ago and is now going quite strong (hundreds of blogs are sold every week).
2. Aaron suggested some kind of blog consolidation / federation would rock.
3. Duncan agreed.
4. Aaron continued his thoughts.

I’m sure there were other bits to the conversation, but these are the ones I saw. Now I’m in no way suprised that these two gents are thinking this way. After all, this was in many ways the nexus for b5 (as Duncan noted in his post). Not that I, in any way, am laying claim to that vision, after all both of them were around when that vision was being evolved (though both were at different points in its evolution).

So that’s the history.

Now, it sounds like these guys are basically saying “if you can put together a half dozen blogs that are all doing mid-sized (150K pages/month) traffic, you have something worth buying”.

There are two problems with this purely from the advertising side (I say this because Aaron’s thinking is more on the conversation/content side). First, is that even 1MM combined pageviews isn’t that much traffic. Now, obviously my experience at b5 is tainting this, so full disclosure: we do what we do because of our experiences.

But lets break this down real quick. 1MM pageviews per month gives you 2MM high value impressions (ie: above the fold). Right now, bloggers are lucky to be making 50c/unit. So that’s 1000$/month. 1K/month split amongst six blogs? That’s nothing.

The reality is that small and medium blogs that have real value, great content, solid writers and an engaged community will always, always, always make more money from sponsorships than CPM-based ads.

The long and short is that grabbing a half dozen or even a few dozen blogs together won’t net you CPMs of more than 4-5$. And even 5MM pageviews/month only really nets the whole network 5K/month.

This addresses the larger issue though. To get higher CPMs, you need someone to sell that inventory. And that is where the bottleneck is. It’s not in inventory, or even quality inventory. It’s someone that can  go to agencies, go to Microsoft, go to Disney, go to P&G, go to Vonage, go to Dell and say “here’s somthing of value and here’s why you should pay more for it”.

Because without a sales team, you’re stuck in the 1-2$ CPM world or you’re “stuck” selling sponsorships (which I’m a huge fan of for high quality mid-sized blogs).

All of that said, b5 will be releasing a new product this fall (hopefully at BlogWorld, maybe even at Gnomedex) which we’re hoping will help alleviate this issue. More on that later, because I don’t want to turn what is a valuable discusion into an infomercial

End of the day, this is a great discussion, but inventory without quality control won’t sell. And quality inventory without a sales force won’t sell. What might be more interesting is for smart folk like Aaron and Duncan to take the Huffington Post and Seeking Alpha models and to try and apply those to tech blogging. I’m just sayin’.

Update: Also wanted to note that if the way to get around not making enough money was to shove a bunch of blogs together and somehow magically have advertisers come, no blog network would have ever failed… And, sadly, most actually have