Here at IDI, we are taking careful note of the trend of building blog advertising networks in an effort to make blogs more attractive to businesses. Nick Denton and Gawker Media is one of the pioneers in aggregation with five sites in June 2004 and 14 today (including Wonkette, Defamer, Gizmodo and Gridskipper).
However, though there is a network, advertising with Gawker Media is geared more toward the individual site in the network rather than network-wide. The aggregation serves as a promotional gimmick for their websites (like the web-rings of old) rather than a tool for advertisers to find their target audience across many blogs they may not have heard of, yet.
BlogAds.com has taken a different pulled together (in part based on blogger and advertiser requests) the Liberal Blog Advertising Network and later added a Conservative network as well. Now BlogAds brilliantly has “mini-networks” – if you are looking for Los Angeles blogs or baseball blogs or gay blogs or evangelical blogs, BlogAds has the network for you and a few more you might find of interest for your narrow target audience. These networks will only grow over time. (Check out more of Henry Copeland’s excellent ideas here.)
Now comes news of Pajamas Media — so-called because bloggers are still seen (by some) as the pajama-hedeen, lounging around at home taking potshots at the gainfully employed. An old and often false stereotype! But a great name for a network, nevertheless. This new network of bloggers might lean conservative since its co-founders are prominent right-leaning bloggers, Charles Johnson (of Little Green Footballs) and Roger L. Simon. However, one of the contributing bloggers is The Manolo, a shoe/fashion blogger of growing influence (and a personal favorite).
Johnson and Simon say they plan on “aggregating weblogs together into a new media form”. I’m not sure what that means, but I am curious to learn more. Certainly we believe that the blogs gain their true power when they “blogstorm” or gather in numbers to raise the profile of an issue. Finding ways to increase collaboration and make readings blogs easier could have an impact on raising the profile and prestige of blogs themselves. Stay tuned – they plan on launching soon.