Sunday, November 06, 2005
Thoughts On Pajamas Media
I left this as a comment to this post over at BuzzMachine, and since it was so post-like I thought I ought to cross-pollinate the blogosphere with my thoughts. Here’s what I had to say about Pajamas Media, in which we have decided not to participate, after our initial enthusiasm and visions of tens or even hundreds of dollars blog income per month:
I was excited by the original PJ concept. I grew more skeptical over time, and what it ended up being bore limited resemblance to the plan as presented to me in one of the early NDA invitations. Change isn’t automatically bad, as things sometimes don’t work out as expected or prove viable, but it looked too different, and lost the main incentive it had for many of us: shared revenue and clout for distributed advertising across many small blogs.
I had pictured it as a way to sell blog advertising to mass marketers; companies that rely on saturation. Thus the possibility in my mind that hundreds or thousands of blogs might all display the same ad for, say, Coca-Cola, when no blog except maybe the very largest would ever get an advertiser of that size, with that spending power. I perceived it as a way for a blogger whose ads might not even be worth $10 a month through BlogAds, where they wouldn’t even talk to people that size anymore anyhow and were a chronic source of poor loading of some blogs that did have BlogAds, to perhaps dip a bucket in the ad ocean and come up with, say, 50 clams where the alternative might have been lucky if it’s 10. Bonus if sometimes quality writing on small name blogs could be syndicated alongside writing from larger blogs.
TPTB behind PJ were perhaps more excited about the content angle, and walked away from the distributed advertising (in whatever form they had envisioned it that may or may not have resembled my perception of what the proposed) on smaller blogs as technically onerous. Which I could see it possibly being. I could also see it being killed by inside the box thinking or desires of monetary backers. Oh well.