Thursday, March 06, 2008

Blog Networks Have Big Dreams

Federated Media, Technorati, and Glam are blog and advertising networks looking for big money to grow, according to TechCrunch. The publishers are seeking 10s of millions to grow into vertical publishing empires focused on subjects such as technology and women.

TechCrunch questions the sanity of seeking big investments because it puts more pressure on revenues in a publishing that is still sorting itself out. Having millions in VC helps for the short term, but the demand to return on that investment could be too high if advertisers aren't ready to pay for ads that are distributed across a variety of blog sites.

It's not an easy business to sell into big ad agencies that are used to dealing with mainstream media buys with large audiences. Going for the gold now may create a bubble that backfires if vertical ad networks take off slower than expected.

(Full disclosure -- I'm the co-founder of a rich media publishing company that sells ads on blogs, so I understand these challenges and am taking a different approach.)

Posted By John Gartner at 08:40 AM
Permanent Link: Blog Networks Have Big Dreams | Comments (0)

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