There are 35 million blogs in the world…and rising…at the rate of 75000 a day. I have eleven of them…perhaps even 97 depending on how they are counted. I have made 250 postings during the first half of this year…204 to this daily William Shepherd blog, 33 to Shepherd on Climate, seven to my Magna Carta II blog, five to my Market Trader blog, one to a Family Research blog…although this is a little misleading as the one posting contains a couple of dozen entries…and two others awaiting my attention…one on the History of Usury and the other one set up in support of the September 2006 Radical Consultation.
My blog hosts work out of Berlin and have sold me 100 blogspaces with 7% currently in use...which is why blogspots are on offer to Chinese Dissidents if they can get their material out of China…Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Problem. It was nice to get 100 blogs but removing adverts from my blogs was why I bought the package. I have a few other blogs dotted around…a couple at Rupert Murdoch's My Space and two with a Swedish Bloghost where 13% of the bloggers are in love, 18% are miserable, 10% are angry and a splendid 59% are happy with their lives.
Were I a typical member of the blogging fraternity you could divide that 35 million by ten and get 3.5 million bloggers in the world…or 350 000 of us worldwide. But I am not typical. Another approach would assume Pareto’s Law applies with 20% of the blogs getting 80% of the traffic. This would then suggest a hard core of five million Real Blogs and one million Real Bloggers…people like China’s Hao Wu of Beijing or Bust, America’s Rebecca MacKinnon of Harvard’s Global Voices, Sweden’s Karolina Lassbo of Glamour Princess’ Diary and me.
Anything with millions attracts the attention of the PLM…the Politico-Legal-Media Complex…and in particular the advertising end of M. The advertisers’ first question is always if their money is well-spent. They know that half of it is wasted but do not know which half. Television Media Companies get paid by the number of eye-pairs they deliver to the advertiser…viewers with Face Furniture count double. But are they looking and will they buy?
To the embarrassment of the advertising industry the answer to the second question appears to be no. A film maker recently placed a camera on top of a few dozen television sets…facing the sofas…and edited the raw footage they produced into a documentary film. People with the family television on do not actually watch it. In fact they will do almost anything to avoid watching it. Whoops. And we thought they just went to the kitchen to make tea at half-time.
For each Tuned In, Turned Off and Shopped Out question there are sub-questions like who is watching and who is spending whose money. But do Watchers Buy? The answer is sought in anecdote and statistics. With anecdote the game is to find a success story and ignore the fact that every success breeds a thousand failures.
And Direct Mail is an example of statistics. It’s a percentage game. Send out a million pieces of junk, get a few hundred responses with a few hundred percent mark up on the crap you bought at a distress sale…plus some other tricks you can pull…pay your expenses and you turn a profit. If not take a loss and offset it against taxes. In the worst case file for company bankruptcy…before paying expenses…except up front ones. Ain’t Capitalism wonderful?
The advertising business runs on Hype ‘n Hope…the old Wing & A Prayer formula. The next Great Hope Hype are the Bloggers…and one of them comes in pink. Karolina Lassbo is doing her Law Finals at Uppsala University. But between classes she is a Design Guru for the Pretty in Pink teenage set. Her blogsite gets 30000 visitors a week.
Karolina’s global audience is thirty times the size of mine. My blogscore is 2500 page views this year on this blog and 750 on the Climate and the Franklin blogs with on average 2-page views per visitor…me and search engines among them. Glamour Princess’ Diary runs a few campaigns which are typically short-lived but lucrative…bringing in a few kronor per click. But most of her income comes from Tradedoubler…a European webcommerce provider similar to the US-based MeCommerce from Goodstorm…motto Capitalism Done Right...that eBay has her eyes on.
These webfirms provide bloggers with a list of advertisers to choose from, tracks their trading and pays a percentage of retail on each online trade…50% in the case of MeCommerce. The idea of visitors buying stuff from a blogger they trust and want to support is nice. I had plans to back up my recent remark that ‘my Drinking Policy is not to until the sun goes beneath the yardarm’ by doing the rounds of the neighbourhood alcohol division…the pub…of our friendly global drug pushers and offering to shift to mid-afternoon…or repeat myself in mid-winter…for a slice of the action and a shilling in the pound to Leopold Kohr’s Academic Inn. But it makes more sense to sell from the ‘vast catalogue of books, DVD's, CD's, and video games’ at MeCommerce…were it not for one little cloud on the horizon.
Annica is a friend of Karolina. Her blog tells me…and a few thousand others in the blogosphere…that she was moving her blog to her own domain ‘to get rid of that pesky blogspot ad’. Hmm! Annica recommends you listen to Qu'est Ce Que J'ai Fait by Tony Head and read Blood on the Moon by James Ellroy. Why not buy them through me?