Seth’s Godin has an interesting post unpacking three types of blogs.
He classifies them as:
1. News Blogs – Chronicling the News of the day on a variety of topics from Politics to Gadgetry to Recipies.
2. Writers Blogs – Where a writer rants, raves, monologues, writes – generally original content inspired by life, readers questions, others thoughts.
3. Our Blogs – Community centred blogs where posts stimulate discussion – its less about one blogger’s ideas but about a communal learning/discussion/discovery etc.
Of course some blogs attempt to sit between two of these categories – or emerge from one into another over time.
Thinking about Revenue Streams – how does this apply to commercial opportunities? –
News Blogs – most of the blogs out there that seem to be attempting to generate revenue directly seem to fit into the ‘News Blog’ type category. For example consider Gizmodo which points to and announces new technological gadgets. There are hundreds of other blogs doing similar things including most of my own ventures.
Some Writers blogs are big and popular enough to generate some income but in my experience it is pretty hard to do so as the advertising pool can be a little limited. Some of the blogs that I’d say fit into this cateogory who run ads include Instapundit and Andrew Sullivan.
‘Our Blogs‘ I see as a bit of an untapped area in terms of the commercial nature. One of the things I’ve noticed about some ‘Our Blogs’ is that they generate ALOT of repeat traffic. People come back to them to interact, leave comments, lurk, debate – this is an idea situation for impression based ads programs like Fastclick. In my experience these community type blogs don’t tend to do well on programs that rely on clicks as much because those using the blogs become a little blind to the ads – but impression based ads are another story. One of the blogs that I’ve seen that is very successful in its community focus work is Idol Blog.
Read more of Seth’s thinking at Three kinds of blogs
