The Missing Point of Blog Alliances

The Missing Point of Blog Alliances / 07.28.08

Last week I came across a wonderful set of blog entries discussing the possibility of putting together a blogging alliance so that it would be easier to get advertisers and therefore make money. I’m going to list some of the entries I came across here so you might want to read those before continuing on.

Now if you notice what is interesting about the group of entries is that they are all written by people that are currently or were involved in blog networks so you would think they would all understand what it really takes for a blog alliance of any kind to work. When you think of a blogging alliance the logic breaks down like this: gather a group of sites together, bunch their traffic together, showcase that traffic to advertisers, bank. The problem with this thinking though is that advertisers don’t look at the numbers first. If they did everyone would be on Facebook and Myspace.

And this is the missing point. If your blog can’t pull off advertising on its own then it probably won’t fair any better in a blogging alliance. If you can’t get advertisers coming to you without the help of others then your blog lacks brand recognition. Now don’t confuse brand recognition with how large your traffic is. I ran a design blog back in the days that wasn’t a traffic monster, but within its community the brand was strong and therefore advertisers always came knocking.

A simpler example. How many blog networks ever really take off? Not many because the core sites that make up the networks don’t have strong brands. 9rules would have never taken off if we hadn’t started with a strong stable of core sites. Those sites became the brand for us and provided the launching pad for greater things.

What is funny is that this talk of a blogging alliance isn’t new. It happens about twice a year and people get excited and nothing happens because it is not that simple. There is only one alliance that I can think of that has actually worked and become a best of the business network and that is The Deck. What you’ll notice about that network is that those sites could bring in advertising on their own without a network, but powered together they actually do become stronger. The sum isn’t always greater than the individual parts, but in this case it is.

Keep in mind there are advertising networks that fair very well for some people, Text Link Ads being a perfect example, but that is due to the sheer size of the network. You still have to be a decent site to succeed within the network.

2 Responses

Tyme White // July 28th, 2008

Bloggers fall into this trap because it is easier to try to merge together to try and be “bigger” (and hopefully more appealing) than fix the real problem (or face the real problem). The inability to make money leads back to the inability to maintain traffic which is the real problem (which could be for a host of reasons). Inability to maintain traffic means they don’t have a large loyal audience.

Advertisers aren’t looking for large pageview numbers alone. They are looking for large pageview numbers for sites that have loyal audiences - so that if an ad appears on the site they can calculate the percentage of people who will purchases the product. For some reason bloggers forget that one main component.

Paul Scrivens // July 28th, 2008

You are exactly right and is one of the points that confused me about all of this talk. If it was so easy to just join up a couple of blogs to form some sort of advertising conglomerate it would’ve been done a million times over already.