However, almost in passing, Nick Cohen mentioned something that - combined with a TechCrunch post I'd read that day - sparked a few neurons and I thought I'd jot it down.
Nick mentioned that newspapers are in decline; blogging is on the rise but that no one is making blogging pay and so how do the journalists continue to exist. ( I'm paraphrasing that pretty heavily, but I think that was the general idea. )
On the way home, my girlfriend and I were thrashing out ways in which it could work and I came up with this comparison.
Today, the newspapers work like this: a bunch of writers create content which are then aggregated by a selected few editors into a handful of publications which are then distributed daily or weekly. The writers are paid by the publication and the publication costs money and charges for advertising space. At the moment it just about works but revenues from sales are falling as more and more people get their content online. Online advertising on their websites in not enough to fund the whole process.
Now how about this scenario: A bunch of writers create content which they post on their individual blogs. This content is aggregated by an computer program based on criteria set by the reader ( e.g. Google Reader ). There are no longer a handful of publications but millions, one for each reader. The writers place adverts in their work, which is included into the RSS reader. As they are a single individual with minimal hosting costs, the revenue from the ads on their work is enough to pay themselves.
This is not a new suggestion, it the basis behind the whole blogging movement. So why are journalists like Nick Cohen unable to make a living from his writing? Note, I realise that Nick doesn't have any adverts on his site, but I believe the point is still valid. TV channels like ITV have existed for years and years entirely funded by adverts. In these days of targeted advertising like Adsense shouldn't this all be possible?
It seems to me that the problem is targeted advertising doesn't really work for high level content like this. As a scientific sceptic and someone who isn't interested in suing anyone for libel, what adverts do you think I would see when I'm reading a blog post about Simon Singh being sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association? The image on the left is the result of a Google search for "Simon Singh Chiropractic libel".
I suppose that some people reading a blog post about this subject would be interested in finding a Chiropractor, but I would have thought there are better advertising subjects like, for example, books by Nick or other Guardian journalists.
When I started writing this post I was going to that what we need are advertising services where I can sign up for a specific demographic. e.g. C# coders, Games Developers, etc. and then I would get targeted adverts with a higher level focus, not just focus on a couple of key words in the post. However, I've no doubt that this actually exists somewhere, I've not looked. So what is lacking? Probably that the advertisers still aren't twigged to the whole online thing. The people who read a Nick Cohen blog, or a blog about Game Tools development should be the easiest people to advertise to in the world. You know exactly what to advertise to them. Well, in fact you probably don't, but you should know what not to advertise to them, and I'm pretty sure Chiropratic services is one of those things.
