Forbes Magazine knocked blogs in a recent article. Their readership isn't up, either, nor is their subscriber base.
The St. Petersburg Times released a column in the Sunday, October 30th edition showing why mainstream media outlets may be down on blogs. The column, by Eric Deggans, begins, lamenting:
This is something my bosses and colleagues may not want me to say. But newspapers are in some serious trouble these days, and not just for the reasons we usually cite.Yes, we have suffered from shrinking circulation figures for some time. The latest dip was an average of 1.9 percent for the six-month period ending in March, according to data from the Audit Bureau of Circulations.
And, yes, there are the disappointing revenue figures - thanks to expenses from hurricanes and rising newsprint costs - which have spurred job reductions and bureau closings at the Boston Globe, the Baltimore Sun, the Hartford Courant, the San Jose Mercury News, the Philadelphia Daily News, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the New York Times.
But the most discouraging piece of this decline may be its cause: newspapers have a tough time satisfying readers who live in an on-demand media world.
The column continues...
And while evidence grows that potential readers want their news delivered a different way, newspaper companies are spending millions to redesign and shrink a product fewer customers want."People under 30, under 35, want their news online ... delivered in a way so they can search it and be in control of the agenda-setting," said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. "What's disappearing is the 7-day-a-week reader. And (newspapers) need to make the case (to advertisers and stockholders) that this is not a problem, it's a transition."
Blogs appear to be filling that gap, and more and more readers are transitioning from newspaper and magazine readership to blogs, and as blogs continue to fill that gap and readers transition from old media staples, blog ad revenue is growing while traditional news publications, such as magazines and newspapers, find their ad revenue decreasing.
Of course, that's not the only frightening thing for traditional media publications. There's now a system in place that allows blog owners to discover the actual dollar-value of their blog. The system, created by blogger-entrepreneur Dane Carlson, created it based on the $25 million AOL-Weblogs Inc. deal.
Article comments
1 - uao
Honestly speaking, and I speak as a blogger who doesn't blog much 'news', I think the blog explosion has been vastly overrated by the media.
First, the numbers: I've heard all kinds of numbers for amount of bloggers. Technorati tracks 20,000,000; Pew, quoted above, say 8 million Americans have started blogs.
According to Technorati, my own blog is ranked #28,776 in the world of blogs. That puts my blog in the top 1% of blogs, which sounds impressive until I add that I doubt more than a dozen or so people read a post from it on a given day. If I add RSS subscription requests, maybe I have about 30 readers.
30 readers = top 1% is not the kind of number that is going to put the New York Times out of business any time soon.
I would estimate the number of active bloggers, non-spamming bloggers who update at least once a week, to be fewer than a million, perhaps as few as 300,000 or so. The other 90% of blogs are spam-blogs, abandoned blogs, blog accounts that have never been activated, and the like.
Of the active blogs, according to Truth Laid Bear, only about 500 get more than 1000 hits per day, and the bulk of those hits are from Google; people looking for something and finding the blog in their search. Most of them really aren't "readers" and won't return.
Only the top-100 blogs in the world have the kind of readership numbers a newspaper or magazine achieves.
So I do think the traditional media is doing a lot of hand-wringing over nothing, which is something they're very good at.
But they would be wise to consider what drives readers to those top 100 blogs; they aren't a threat yet, but give them another couple of years, and they might be.
But I never visit blogs to find "news". I stick to the hardcopy newspaper that arrives at my door, or a newswebsite like msnbc, or something.
Newspapers should focus on what they've always done best: getting factually accurate news and presenting it in an unbiased story. Blogs are for spin, bias, points of view. Newspapers could hire a cluster of bloggers to work under their umbrella, but leave them autonomous; they don't do the same thing newspapers do. A newspaper that tries to copy what blogs do will fail.
2 - Eric Berlin
I would have liked to see more here about the distinction between online media -- online versions of newspapers and other print publications -- and blogs.
I started getting my news nearly exclusively from online sources (New York Times, LA Times, Washington Post, New York Daily News for sports, etc.) before the blog wave came on. So I lost my need for daily print news a long time ago. It's nice to have the occasional newspaper while I'm at a coffee shop or stuck on a train, but online media has really met that need for me. I suspect the same is true for many others.
I suspect that eventually people will have to pay at least a little bit for online versions of major publications. We've seen a start to this with the New York Times making some of its content pay-based.
3 - Mr. Real Estate
Truth Laid Bear is a complete waste of time, as it doesn't necessarily calculate blog revenue generated. I have 356 subscribers to my main blog (via RSS) and get anywhere from 150 to 300 daily unique visitors to it (non-RSS subscribing visitors) - that's nothing close to what more successful blogs, such as Blog Herald and Blogcritics, get, but it's enough to have media buyers contact me to buy ad space on my blog, and it still helps me to close millions in sales each year, so it actually generates revenue. I can bank on my blog, not everyone can, and that includes most media blogs. That was one of the points of this post. Media folks are losing revenues due to blogs, and most of their blogs aren't helping them generate more or new revenues.
I converted to getting all my information online in 1996. While I do read daily newspapers and magazines, I tend to enjoy blogs more, because I can't get the same slant, and sometimes even news, from all the other news media pushing the same story (usually with a similar or slightly different angle), and I can also feel more like I know the writer, which I rarely can do with news media publications, and knowing the writer generates a certain amount of trust. Plus, blogs are far more interactive, and they let me choose the editorial content. Newspapers and magazines tell me what news is; they provide feedback outlets, but I can't tell the St. Petersburg Times what stories they're going to cover; I can do that with blogs, or cover the story, myself, and know it's being read. This may not be a concern to the New York Times, or it may, as they're now charging for more content, due to revenue loss, and they have revenue loss due to waning readership and subscriptions. Their credibility has certainly suffered over time, due to various issues, and that also hinders the publication. Localized community newspapers do not face similar issues, and they're very targeted so they generate revenue easily; blogs are similar. They also do not face scandals involving honesty and plagiarism, which major newspapers often do.
Sorry for the lack of detailed comparisons in the article, and yes, I agree the post could have been better. I sell condos for a living, though, and I had to go show some to a buyer. Just think of what I could write if a major media outlet paid me, or someone else, to blog, who is actually a blogger.
I'm waiting for the day for a newspaper to add a blogger to their editorial board who isn't a previous staff writer. It will come. Just you wait and see.
GDP is up quite a bit and the media is losing money and readers. It will happen when media folks realize the new methodology for generating revenues. I won't pay to read online content when I can read it free on blogs or get it from another source.
Reuters and AP are free, and so is BBC, and I can get most of what I read in the New York Times there without paying $1. The only content I would pay for is the Wall Street Journal, primarily because the content is highly specialized, and I can't get it anywhere else.
4 - Temple Stark
So you have no offline sales presence J. Mudd?
5 - Temple Stark
And you apparently have no advertising on your blogs. If so, it's hidden.
Just testing your theory here.
6 - Natalie Bennett
I think "dead-tree" newspapers are certainly on the way out, although the final death throes will take some time. I've very nearly stopped buying them, partly for environmental reasons - you don't need to use all those physical resources and energy resources.
And online, no one cares if you are a "newspaper", or a TV station, or a blog ... newspapers that haven't already got a strong online presence are in big trouble.
7 - Eric Berlin
My point was only that it's a more complex scenario than Blogs vs. Print Media. There's a huge array of online news and opinion sources.
Further, I still place the most trust in various columnists (Broder at the Washington Times, Brownstein at LAT, etc.) at mainstream media sources. I love blogs and blogging, obviously, but I think most people see it all as various "inputs" (as the Pew Internet & American Life Project recently put it) of information, whether it comes from print, or an online version of a print pub, or a blog, etc.
8 - Mr. Real Estate
Hi Temple: I mail "Just Sold" cards with my website address on them and mail "keep in touch" mailings to previous customers (I also mail or bring them Christmas gifts). I mail Christmas cards and yearly calendars, too. Other than that, everything is online. For my mailings, though, my website is the main focus. The mailings drive traffic to my website, which adds to my blog's traffic, because my blog is linked to it. The ads on my blog are link ads, but not all links are ads. I don't always have ads on there, but from time to time I will oblige a media buyer or other pitch-person.
Natalie: I couldn't agree with you more.
9 - Aaman
%-wise, there is not much original reportage from blogs and that makes all the difference
10 - Mr. Real Estate
Eric: I would tend to agree with you. However, newspapers are still losing revenues and they're losing them to blogs and other online publications. The more independent media sources there are, blogs included, the more other media have to fight to attain that dollar.
Aaman: You're right, and the same thing was said about broadcast news, but it ate away at print news media quite a bit didn't it, and Americans tuned in didn't they? And now blogs are eating away at both, ad-revenue and subscriber-wise, as more and more Americans tune in.
Media folks will hire bloggers one day, I guarantee it.
11 - Eric Berlin
Yes, I agree that newspapers are still reeling from the influence of online media in total. It will be a number of years, I think, before they find a groove / niche (a large niche to be sure) in this new marketplace.
I think the line is already blurring between "blogs" and other forms of online media.
12 - ryan
Why would magazines or newspapers be valued by BLOGVALUTOR?
13 - Mr. Real Estate
Blogvaluator will put a vaue on anything, however, it does appear to place higher values on some sites more than other sites, blog and non-blog alike. I'm not sure why, as I'm not its creator.
14 - Lisa Hoover
Mr. RE - I got my blog listed in the St Pete Times when they first gave the option but ever since Tampa Bay Times did their article on local bloggers, I've heard getting on the list now takes forever. And a day.
15 - Mr. Real Estate
It takes forever and a day if they don't care, and I guarantee you they don't. They only used the article to promote their blog section. They used me to promote it twice. The first one that failed (Dave Gussow's old, clunky tech blog that looked like a message board) and the second one that appears to be succeeding (not all of them are, but some have pretty good readership), now that they actually publish blogs. I just figure that if they're going to interview me for a story that helps them launch a new section, I should automatically be in the directory. After all, those of us who pitched the story on the Business Blogging Awards created the news that lead to the next blogging story, which helped them launch their blog section.
Newspapers are now back to stealing bloggers' stories agsin, rather than using them as sources. It's a never-ending cycle. I see newspapers run stuff I pitched to them all the time without even bothering to include me as the source. And they wonder why their credibility and circulation is down. Helloooo...