Martin has an interesting post on Blog Networks with some comments about B5media especially. Interesting in the comments section are some reflections by Jason Calacanis from WeblogsInc who comments on the idea of revenue sharing as opposed to paying bloggers outright.
While WIN have gone for the paying of bloggers outright after their bloggers reacted against a revenue share/split model – Jason writes that perhaps things have changed now with more bloggers wanting to explore making an income from blogging and as a result an increased number of bloggers willing to do the revenue share thing. He writes:
However, it’s different today – there might be many more people out there to work for a future share of revenue. So, I think B5 and 9rules will both do very well in this space. In fact, it’s the most under serviced space right now, so they have the market all to themselves.
I think that there is some sense in this. What interests me is that despite the criticism of b5’s revenue share model by a few people – we’ve had over 100 bloggers have applied to write for the network – with more pitches arriving in our inboxes every day. These applicants are not your niave, ignorant or inexperienced bloggers either – they know what they are doing and know where they want to blog. Something is going on here.
Also interesting are Jason’s comments about how much their bloggers currently earn:
Today we have over 130 people getting a check every month. The average WIN blogger is doing 80+ blog posts a month (or ~3 day). some folks make a couple of hundreds bucks, some folks a couple of thousand.
