I went to Shiny Media's Brands and Blogs seminar on on Friday.
It's great to see that the blogging debate has finally moved on from stories about how powerful blogs are at destroying brands - not a positive argument to take to a marketing director. One theme that many speakers on Friday returned to was how blogs can deliver a good platform for online media.
The Guardian, B5 Media, Glam and of course Shiny Media themselves are all attempting to create blog channels which can be attractive to advertisers. I'm slightly sceptical about some of the arguments delivered from the stage: I paraphrase a little, but there was a sense of "We're delivering a highly targeted audience, so of course our CPMs should be $20 or so". Out in the chilly world of media buying, the truth is that your CPMs can be whatever you want them to be - but if the media doesn't deliver conversions at volume, you're going to struggle to stay on any plan.
I was also wondering about the status of the blogger in all this grand new world of aggregated blogs. Essentially many of these companies are offering bloggers a way to monetize their work in a way that they would struggle to do themselves (away from the easy embrace of Google Adsense I guess).
But isn't all this just a bit reminiscent of the relationship between the record industry and its stars? The Marillion reference in my title is of course to the dreadful prog rock band (only hit, the uber-dreary "Kayleigh") who pioneered a new online relationship with their audience long before Myspace brought us the Arctic Monkeys and Lily Allen. Marillion were dumped by their record company, but acquired a (presumably quite small) database of the email addresses of their fan base. An email appeal to their fans raised enough money for them to release a further album, Marillion.com. Last.fm has the whole story.
Perhaps I'm a hopeless dreamer, but couldn't individual bloggers find a way to market without needing to wrap up their wares into an aggregated site. At the final reckoning, will the world belong to middlemen like record companies or blog aggregators - or to individual bloggers and 'creative artists' like Marillion?
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