ChasNote

According to Douglas McIntire at 24/7 Wall St, that’s what’s coming, the only remaining question is when.

“…with the internet operations at newspapers and some other tradition media companies making very little headway, the big blogs take on a very significant attraction. They reach audiences in great numbers. They have credibility. They are not expensive to run. And, they make money.

“Take Huffington. According to research firm Compete, it has an audience almost as large as the online version of the Philadelphia Inquirer. As a part of a larger newspaper organization like The New York Times (NYT) or Washington Post (WPO), that audience could probably be much bigger. NYT and WPO need a Huffington or two. Their internet revenues are under 10% of their total and not growing fast enough to keep up with falling print sales. Huffington has raised $10 million in VC money. What is it worth? $100 million. Maybe more. Worth it for The Times or The Post. With the trouble that are in, yes.

“The big tech blogs are even larger than Huffington.”

The theory makes sense, up to a point. Audiences are moving online and advertisers, inevitably, are following them. If traditional publishers and portals can’t keep pace with the independent sites on the audience-growth front, acquisition is the likely strategy. The hard part, though, as McIntire points out is maintaining (and growing) the value of those acquisitions:

“The problem for the potential buyers is keeping the talent at the blog sites.”

It’s a problem that needs to be solved on both sides, the buyer and the seller. If the value of an independent media brand is only that of its front man or woman, the deal terms are bound to penalize him or her for leaving — some kind of long-term lock up that may not be appealing to a site’s author. The independent authors and publishers may want to change this formula. And if a potential acquirer can’t find a way to encourage a site’s author to continue to build relationships with a growing audience of readers over the long term, how will the acquisition premium ever justify itself? Acquiring entities may need a new approach, a model by which they pull top content-creators into the fold, but do so loosely enough that the content-creators can enjoy the freedom and decision-making authority they do right now.

Check it out here.

How Boing Boing editor Xeni Jardin described it to the LA Times:

“We wanted it to be fun and real and something that felt like a natural evolution of a blog,” Jardin said. “We’ve been approached by big TV networks about doing a BoingBoing reality show or ‘American Idol’ type show. But the idea of having a prime-time network show seems like it would automatically be wrong for us and doomed to fail. . . . We wanted to adapt things that are already part of the vernacular of BoingBoing.”

We’re just a few weeks into JCPenney’s sponsorship of FM’s Fall Shopping Guide (see ChasNote 9/17/07), but today I came across an interesting stat: Among the top 5 URLs driving traffic to the Guide is Google’s RSS reader. In other words, visitors to the site like what they see, and they’re subscribing to RSS updates to the site.

From WSJ:

“Advertising wear-out has fascinated researchers since the 1970s. Studies, generally focusing on television commercials, have suggested ads can be viewed anywhere from three to 25 times before losing effectiveness. After that, says Brian Sternthal, a marketing professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, people ‘dismiss the information as old news.’”

“New digital technology also makes it easier to customize ads slightly without having to incur the time and expense of recreating them from scratch. Rajeev Batra, a marketing professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, says such modest alterations can slow down the process of ad fatigue.”

We saw that effect last fall, the first time we created an ad that refreshed with news headlines from the vendor’s site: see Symantec’s RSS-powered content ad.