:D

Saturday, January 16, 2010

Case study

1) Blogger cleared over Girls Aloud rape and murder article. A former civil servant, Darryn Walker, 35, faced prosecution after writing a 12-page blog on a fantasy pornography site.

2) 'Petite Anglaise' blogger quits over fears of internet confessions.
Catherine Sanderson, the owner of the blog 'Petite Anglaise', blurted out details of her sex life, but now one of the original female bloggers says she's giving up her blog over fears of giving away just a bit too much information.

3) As Corporate Ad Money Flows Their Way, Bloggers Risk Their Rebel Reputation.

When Anita Campbell started her Web log about small-business trends two years ago, she thought it would simply be a service for her clients and help her consulting business grow.

Instead, she said, the blog "just took off," attracting more readers than she had dreamed of. Then, companies offered to pay her to post advertisements and product mentions on her site. There were enough offers, she said, that she could choose to work with only the ones relevant to her readers. And so, her blog, once just a marketing tool, became a money generator on its own.

"I never try to hide the fact that I am writing about an advertiser," she said in an e-mail statement. "But I also don't apologize for accepting advertising, and I make it clear that just like everyone else I have to earn a living and pay the expenses of keeping the site going."

After beginning as a vehicle for anti-establishment, noncommercial writers, many Web logs have laid out welcome mats for corporate America in the last couple of years. No one tracks how much advertising money is flowing to Web logs. Nor is it clear how many bloggers, like Ms. Campbell, disclose their sponsors. But when writers have not been completely open, their fellow bloggers have been quick to criticize.

Businesses have noticed the growing readership and influence of these Internet postings and are spending $50 million to $100 million this year on blog advertising and marketing, said Charlene Li, an analyst at Forrester Research, a company that looks at the impact of technology on business and consumers. Recognizing that blogs have become more mainstream, companies are paying for advertisements or mentions on blogs, courting blog writers with public relations efforts and inviting writers to come blog on one of their corporate sites.

The blogosphere, companies said, is an important place to have a presence, and blog writers are not shying away from the attention.

"The attitude has completely changed from where it was two years ago and even a year ago," said Jim Kukral, the publisher of ReveNews, a site about making money from Web logs. "People have started to realize that, hey, this is fun; we've proven it's fun; I enjoy doing it; now let's apply a few advertising techniques and make some money."

There is now an annual Blog Business Summit and several books on how to make money blogging.

Many blog writers have signed up for Google's AdSense program, which started in 2003 and pays Web publishers based on how many times advertisements on their sites receive clicks. Google places the ads on participating Web sites using contextual word matching, in an attempt to ensure that the advertisements relate to the content on the page.

Bloggers are also making money through "affiliate networks," which, in contrast to Google's automated system, allow blog writers to choose which advertisements to put on their pages. They also can be paid based on how often ads on their sites lead to sales rather than how often the ads receive clicks. Shareasale, Commission Junction and LinkShare are three such network companies.

"You have all these self-publishers, people like the bloggers, who suddenly become business partners with Fortune 500 companies," said Heidi S. Messer, the president and chief operating officer of LinkShare, which connects Web writers with companies like Dell, Wal-Mart and Apple Computer.

Sometimes blog writers make money by simply linking to companies' home pages. Companies come up higher in Google, Yahoo and other search engines when they are frequently linked to and mentioned on many sites, including blogs.

USWeb, an online marketing firm, has run campaigns this year that pay people $5 to mention a company or link to its site. Most of the companies USWeb works with do not allow the company to identify them, said Ed Shull, the chief executive of USWeb, but some that he can mention include Lussori.com, a watch and jewelry company; Dot Flowers; and Terra Entertainment.

Currently, USWeb is asking people with personal profile pages on myspaces.com, a social networking site, to include a trailer from Terra Entertainment's coming release of the film "One Perfect Day" on their pages. In exchange, these Web users will have their names listed on the end of the credits on the film's DVD, Mr. Shull said.

USWeb has been criticized by some blog writers for not requiring its network of about 5,000 blog writers to disclose payments. It is currently completing guidelines on how bloggers should disclose that they were paid to mention products, Mr. Shull said.

"We are still leaving this as an option to bloggers," he said in an e-mail statement, "but we do recommend that they disclose to readers that advertisers do support the site through paid mentions."

To be sure, most blog writers do not make any money, and those who do often make only enough to pay their site fees. There are now at least 21.5 million Web logs worldwide, according to Technorati, a company that tracks blog postings. Many blogs remain primarily personal postings that Internet users pursue purely because of their own interests.

Still, large numbers of online writers are interested in making money.

4) One of the first sex scandals of the blogosphere ended, of course, in a book deal. In May, Ana Marie Cox, the Internet gossip whose blog, Wonkette, focuses on Washington, published a link to another blogger who called herself the Washingtonienne. In the blog, Washingtonienne, a Capitol Hill employee, used a Senate computer to post intimate details about her experience sleeping with six different men, some of whom were paying for her favors. Washingtonienne listed her partners by their initials and occupations, from the married ''Chief of Staff at one of the gov agencies, appointed by Bush'' to her current boyfriend, a fellow Senate staff member. Praising Washingtonienne for her candor and honesty (''You go, girl!''), Wonkette identified her as Jessica Cutler, a 26-year-old mail sorter for Senator Mike DeWine, an Ohio Republican, who promptly fired her from her $25,000-a-year job. After a flurry of interviews in the newspapers and on TV, she sold a novel based on her blog to Hyperion for a figure that Wonkette estimated at $300,000. Cutler's agent announced that she would pose nude for Playboy but would not talk to the media until the book was published. Her privacy, after all, had to be respected.

Credits:
Wikipedia, Google, Yahoo, The New York Times.

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