pc4media is making some sense writing on Access to Inventory. Ad sales is Most Profitable when More Inventory is Accessible
‘No matter how good your writing is, if you don’t have a full time sales guy selling ad inventory, you aren’t making a living. And therefore, the more writers you have – the more inventory you have – the easier it is to sell the inventory. The more inventory you have – the more money you make – the more sales people you can hire. And the cycle continues. Pretty simple formula.
So, if you are blogging for profit and you aren’t playing on a team or teams or atleast have a sales team working for you, you won’t be blogging for profit very long.’
I see the sense behind such a statement but don’t completely agree. I’m a one man band, I don’t have anyone selling ads for me (except for me) and I am making a good living from my blogging.
Yes I could do better if I had a full time ad selling person and more people writing with me, however at this point that isn’t possible. I am hoping to expand things a little in the next 12 months but at this point am finding things are working out pretty well. I guess its each to their own and a medium where there is no one way to be successful.
I am a one man band and there is no reason a one man band cannot make a site/blog with huge inventory by themselves.
Easier in groups? Yes. Only possible in groups? No!
Bah, their “pretty simple formula” is baloney.
I’m a one-man operation (unless you consider that Google and other networks are selling ads for me) and it would be a waste of time to hire full time ad sales people. There’s a diminishing return.
More importantly, more inventory is not always a good thing—ask anyone in retail. More IN-DEMAND inventory is a good thing, but finding that demand is harder than just throwing more writers at the problem…
I’m new to this form of media but I’m a big believer in history, and that it repeats itself. Newspapers were once owned by mom & pop publishers, but small corporations and now huge corporations own almost all of them. TV and radio stations followed the same path. A major share of media in the country (and world) is owned and controlled by relatively few people. The Internet has opened things up for the average person to express him or herself with a Web site or blog, but to make money with it and have staying power is much harder. There will be consolidation in the blog business just as we saw it in mergers and acquisitions on Web properties. There are rewards that go to the good and nimble — and always have — but the lion’s share inevitably goes to the lions. Once the larger players figure out where to gain a grip and how to identify where the profitability will ultimately be in blogs (and we may not know this yet as it’s still a young medium), they will put the money and effort into controlling market share. We may have 20-30 million blogs by the end of this year, and perhaps hundreds of millions by the end of the decade. If even one percent of those are trying to make a living from them, I think the game will change from what we know it to be today. Imagine 2-3 million bloggers trying to communicate with the marketers who control ad budgets? It will be mayhem. The game will have to change to have any order to it, and that means somebody will have to exert some control, create some kind of organization that we can comprehend and operate under, and big players do very well under those circumstances. I love the passion seen through blogs and many of those we read today — maybe even Darren’s Pro Blogger — will become legendary as the medium grows. But single bloggers will, to some degree, give way to groups of bloggers, then to even larger and more highly focused groups who can deliver major page views daily in specific demographic/psychographic categories, building significant ad revenue from traditional sources, and then big corporations will buy them up. It’s happened that way in all forms of print and broadcast media. The key for all of us is to get into the “good and nimble” business right now, then ride the wave. Just my .02. Thanks.
They are right, a business is built on systems, meaning that it is not dependant on people. People are only trainable components but not the core of the business. Think MacDonalds. It can be done by any half whit 15 year old. What you have is a self employment situations. It has the tax benifits of a business and a certain amount of freedom. But if you owned a real business, you could take a year off and the business would be worth more when you came back than when you left. That’s my (and Rich Dad’s) definition of a business.