The Professionalization of Blogs

Newsweek online has an article about blogger Jason Kottke quiting his day job and becoming a professional blogger. It seems that an increasing number of blogs across many segments are being authored by professionals. By professional I mean people who blog for a living or blog as part of their work. While this definition is not precise, my aim it to differentiate between people who blog for fun or as a hobby, and people who blog to make money or for business purposes.

This blog - Future Now - is an example of a work related blog, although the contributors consider this as much as a hobby as work. There are a lot of examples of work related blogs. In most cases these blogs have several goals, often including information sharing with potential customers or business partners and softly promoting the authors and/or their businesses. In some cases work related blogs are designed to sell things or make money. Maytag's Skybox blog is a great example of an effective sales oriented blog (thanks to Franz for spotting this). Work related blogs can be authored by the biggest companies in the world all the way down to one person shops.

Another professional segment is the entrepeneurial blogger. These are folks that blog for living. Kottke is now an example of a professional blogger. Another good example is Silicon Valley Watcher, which is an entrepenurial blog written by a former professional journalist. It seems a lot of former journalists are becoming entrepenurial bloggers (they are probably still professional journalists, but I'll leave that for others to decide).

The advent of blogger advertising models coupled with low entry costs and the distribution reach of the Internet makes professional blogging attractive to new entrants. Although there are still few examples of blogs generating substantial revenue, the opportunity to make money and have an appealing job and lifestyle. appears to be excellent. This opportunity is attracting a lot of entrepeneurs to blogging.

The opportunity is also leading to the creation of new media companies, and attracting traditional media companies to blogging. Gawker, Always On and Corante are all blog oriented new media companies. While traditional media seems threatened by blogs, they are also rapidly adding blogs to their product portfolios. It's hard to find a traditional media company that isn't at least experimenting with blogs at this point.

The reason I'm posting this is we are trying to understand how the blogging industry will likely evolve over the next few years. My working hypothesis is that an increasing number of blog segments will be dominated by a relatively small number of professional bloggers. Because these blogs are run as businesses they will be better resourced, more professionally produced, and will likely have more compelling content than amateur blogs. They will also be more aggressive about site promotion and traffic generation. For these reasons they will likely attract a large share of the segment's traffic and heavily influence related blogs through linking and referencing.

This is not to say that amateur and consumer blogging will not continue to thrive and grow. I expect that many blogging segments will be dominated by consumers and amateurs - especially segments where making money with blog content is difficult or impossible (personal and family diaries for example). There will also continue be many amateur blogs in all segments due to low entry and maintenance costs. However, I think in segments capable of supporting professional blogs, these blogs will capture a big share of the audience.

This already appears to be happening in several segments. I recently went through Technorati's Top 100 blogs and almost all of the top 50 are professional blogs. Wil Wheaton was an exception, but he is now using his blog to sell his books. The majority of the second 50 are also professional blogs. In the consumer gadget segment the combination Gizmodo, Engadget, and a couple of the new media company sites probably get substantially more traffic than all the other gadget related blogs combined - and there appears to be thousands of gadget related blogs.

Whether or not segments of the blog industry consolidates - and whether or not professional bloggers dominate many segments - will be a major driver of the social and business impact blogs will have. Please let me know your thoughts and reactions on this subject.

Thanks.

Comments

[Franz]

Steve,

Good post ... depends in part the way you ultimately define professional. I still consider blogs an amateur thing, and am skeptical of those that ask you for money up front. I just dont get the idea that these folks are asking for pay to hire a fact-checking department ...

I consider myself an amateur, but my blogging is an offshoot of my professional and personal research work Pro/Am? ... so I dont ask for payment. Its the equivalent of having a research notebook, but inviting in a few thousand of your friends to read, comment and dispute.

I do receive benefit as a result, new professional contacts, pointers to related information, contrarian opinions .... but its all a side-effect of the approach.

A professional journalist has to live by their work, and its quite natural to use a blog, to get their name recognized, to promote their other work ... but I also get the idea that there is some uneasiness with the blog metaphor, since its nature does not include pay, unless its by side-effect linked to a mainstream magazine.

The Technorati 100 list is interesting, but I went down the list of those I read regularly, and very few of those are apparently professional by my accounting, but maybe thats just me.

[Franz]

Also, I note that David Goldberg of the University of Illinois has posted on your note, and provides an academics professional view. Academics professional View. Good links, and a notable view of the blog-as-a-bully pulpit, which he has certainly done well.

[Hans Henrik]

Steve;

I think you have some very valid points in your post. With close friends I just launched a brand new blog about innovation and design – is also a semi-professional weblog. – CPH127 –

www.cph127.com

I agree with the most of your conclusions, but isn’t there a time-issue.? When will it happen? Does it happen already?

All the best

Hans Henrik