The Economist on the commercial prospects of blogging. The arguments about whether or not Tony Perkins’ AlwaysOn is or is not blogging is a purely semantic one; if Perkins’ attempt to create sponsorships of “high quality” weblogging is profitable, then it’s clearly developing content of value to someone.
Ultimately, at least two different models will emerge: a sponsored/advertising model, and a fee for tools/hosting model, like Radio.
Thanks for the mention.
Our goal at AO is to create several revenue streams such as sponsorship, premium member subscriptions, e-commerce, build your own classifieds, etc. On the back-end, we are building a fully automated, self-service site based on open source software, which can be operated at a very cheap rate. I really think it is a great time to build new web media brands as crazy as that might sound coming off the bubble. Particularly because I think advertisers are looking for new things to associate their brands with.
Cheers, tp