My friend and mentor Renny Koshy just had a brainwave this day …
Renny: no anonymous postings!!! (on logic2go.com)
Renny: How could you do that…
Renny: don’t you believe in FREE SPEECH?
Renny: OF course not…
Me: nope
Renny: you marawadi’s prolly want to CHARGE us for writing on your BLOG!?
Me: heyyyyyyyyyy
Me: not a bad idea
Me: CHARGE us for writing on your BLOG!!!! <<-- idea of the millenium
Renny: heheh right
Renny: I wish it was that simple…
He brings up TWO good ideas here …
1) How can blogs become a better revenue source (other than Ads by Google)?
(a) Regular Subscription is a good way to look at it.
(b) How would a pre-paid pack of (say) 100 comments for $10 work?
That way people can comment on some really popular blogs by paying. The tons of junk comments that consists of “ok”, “yeah”, “same here” will be trimmed instantly.
And (hopefully) comments would now be specific to the topic and bring greater depth and more info to the discussions.
2) How simple can it be to pay for services like this?
(a) Tough to implement per-blog charge (credit-card entry) screens. But it could be done at LJ level (where LJ gets a cut, of course).
(b) Might be a micro-payment service – WSJ had a huge article on this the other week Find it on Google yourself
Something like BitPass? or TxTPay?
BTW, your comments are welcome. This blog is still accepting free comments.
*BONUS* Now accepts anonymous comments too!
9 Jun 2004 at 1:55 am
Somewhere on the internet –
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Some of the findings include:
* 4.12 million blogs in existence using the following blog clients: Blog-City, BlogSpot, Diaryland, LiveJournal, Pitas, TypePad, Weblogger and Xanga.
* 66.0% of blogs haven’t been updated for at least 2 months. (thats 2.72 million abandoned blogs out of the above total)
* 1.09 million were one day blogs only with only posts on their first day
* Males are more likely to abandon blogs. Those writing long posts (on average) were less likely to abandon their blogs.
* The average active blog is updated once every 14 days.
* 92.4% of blogs were created by those under 30 years of age.
* 56% of blogs were created by females.
* Projected estimates see 5 million blogs by the end of 2003 and 10 million by the end of 2004.
Hmmm – so the average blog was started by a teenage girl, its likely to have been abandoned, probably only ever written in once. If she updates it, its probably only once a fortnight. But have no fear, there will be twice as many of them in just 15 months time.
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With Stats like that, I doubt blogging will be a successful revenue generator. I’m surprised that there are no read stats, which I think will be 100 times more atleast. I see it more like a community power tool, which would make people flock to a site.
9 Jun 2004 at 9:30 am
Projected estimates see 5 million blogs by the end of 2003 and 10 million by the end of 2004
One thing, guess these stats are old, if it has projections from 2003?
Still, I think they paint a better picture of blogging today than do most other media.
However, don’t you think that there could exist so many specialized blogs (gizmodo for e.g.) that were solely created to serve up content, and less as personal journals.
It is these specific blogs that could target a revenue model based on subscriptions/comments.
I agree that the average teenage blogger doesn’t think of his/her blog as a revenue source nor do they care if they can make 100 bucks off of it every month.
The real money flows once people convert it into a successful business model as in this Wired article on Blog business models.
These are the kinds of blogs I was referring to when it comes to a money making opportunity.
Hence my comments of moving beyond the “ads by Google” model (for them).