Blog-Casting and the Future of Blog Advertising - Juan Cole, Informed Consent

Do I worry about blog advertising corrupting the medium?

Not very much.

In my view, corporate news media have been harmed by media consolidation (having only a few owners, all of them big wealthy corporations) far more than by advertising. It is an editorial decision whether to insist that the news division make 15 percent profit or whether to keep it as a loss leader. They had advertising in Bill Paley's day, too, but at that time CBS news was a big, relatively independent operation. If you have only 5 CEOs making that decision for virtually all television news, and if they are competitors, then there is a real danger that they will all sacrifice news to profit.

But because the price of entry is so low, you can never have ownership consolidation in weblogging. It will always be a distributed medium and therefore very difficult to control. If professional bloggers emerged who came to be unduly beholden to their advertisers and started not covering certain stories or spinning them for the sake of their sponsors, other non-professional bloggers would just step into the breach. If corporate media bought up a few big bloggers, they would still have to compete against literally millions of independents, and if any of the independents was providing what the audience wanted better, the traffic would shift to them. In the world of weblogging, any form of censorship actually creates opportunities for those immune to it.

Technical limitations and expense make it almost impossible for anyone now to start up a new 24 hour a day news channel. But anyone can start a blog. I expect journalist cooperatives (both professional and amateur) to emerge over time that do podcasting, and eventually webcasting with video, finally breaking the current semi-monopoly in broadcast news.

So it seems to me that blog-casting with regard to advertising, but retaining lots of independent blogs is the best of all possible worlds. And advertising blog-casting may finally begin addressing a key problem in the business model, which is that blog advertising rates are ridiculously low. Bloggers are essentially offering a front-page panel for what a small classified ad would cost in a small town newspaper, and the circulation rates may be similar.

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