Do you blog? Blogging 101

See the excellent article in Business Week
Blogs Will Change Your Business

Look past the yakkers, hobbyists, and political mobs. Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our advice: Catch up...or catch you later

This is just the beginning. Many of the same folks who developed blogs are busy adding features so that bloggers can start up music and video channels and team up on editorial projects. The divide between the publishers and the public is collapsing. This turns mass media upside down. It creates media of the masses.

A new study being published by the University of Texas and Chitika says that the top 50,000 blogs may have generated around $500 million in aggregate 2006 revenue. The data behind the study is rather thin - They are looking at the Chitika blog advertising network, which includes 12,000 blogs, and estimating that most blogs would have three distinct revenue sources. Blog rankings are determined by Technorati rank.

The study results are embedded below. An interesting conclusion is that blog revenue may defy the “80/20 rule”, with even more revenue going to top blogs than usual, with 20% of total revenue going to the top 1% of blogs. “Upon closer observation, it was found that model tends to overestimate the revenue at less popular blogs, but underestimates it at more popular ones” the study says. And:

Summary of Findings: Ad revenue in a blog is more sensitive to the rank of the blog than what one would expect in a typical Zipf Law 80/20 curve situation. One reason for this may be the social value of advertising in a blog. If online advertising is like advertising in a mall, advertising in the blogosphere is like advertising in a country club.

• The top 1% accounted for approximately 20% of the total revenue.
• The top 5% accounted for approximately 50% of the total revenue.
• The top 10% accounted for approximately 80% of the total revenue.
• The top 15% accounted for approximately 90% of the total revenue.

Again, the data behind the study is very thin, and using Technorati to determine the top 50,000 blogs may not be a perfect indicator either.