Pajamas Media Heats Up
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Blogging, Media70 blogs from all across the political spectrum signed up for the November 7th launch.
Will it fly or flop?
“It will be the best of mainstream media and best of blog media, side by side, sometimes fighting, sometimes agreeing,” said Roger Simon, a novelist and blogger who co-founded Pajamas Media.The site aims to be “a whole online news service of bloggers from all over the world,” said Simon. With a list of contributors that reads like a who’s who of the political blogosphere, Pajamas Media thinks its daily blog picks will be of a higher quality than automated services like Memeorandum or keyword aggregators like Technorati.
And the drawbacks? Ann Althouse shares.
Ann Althouse was contacted to join Pajamas Media, but declined because of the advertising revenue scheme that is going to make the project tick. Pajamas Media will provide all associated bloggers with advertising, but will also limit the individual bloggers’ control over what ads will be displayed.While this means that bloggers won’t have to hustle for ads, it will put a cap on the amount of money someone on the Pajamas Media network can make.
“It did not come anywhere near to being an attractive deal for me for many reasons. The No. 1 reason was the skimpy payment compared to Blogads,” said Althouse.
Personally, this is how all media goes eventually. You have a bunch of people working for a big congolmerate that guarantees them monthly dollars so they can actually plan their life around their preferred “occupation.”
Sure, the top bloggers like Althouse have the luxury of counting on rather nice BlogAd sums, but for smaller sites this doesn’t make much sense. Eventually harnessing the power of the network will prove much more valuable.
My question then is, why should blogging ultimately be different than any other form of media when it comes to monetization?
This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 26th, 2005 and is filed under Blogging, Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
October 26th, 2005 at 11:35 pm
Actually, for a real serious critique, albeit from one of the early partners in the enterprise, check out this:
http://dennisthepeasant.typepad.com/dennis_the_peasant/2005/10/sorry_but_youre.html
October 27th, 2005 at 12:23 am
Perfect! I was just going to link to the same thing! Read it, read it, read it
August 6th, 2006 at 7:51 am
Good job.