Blogging: A Multi-Million Dollar Industry

It's not just blog networks that are riding the wave. Professional bloggers around the globe are coming out with news that their annual incomes are exceeding the 6-figure mark (dollars, mind you). Darren Rowse and Manolo Blahnik openly disclose substantial earnings on their respective blogs. Audi and Alfa advertise on blogs (Audi's A3 campaign investment in blogAds constituted 3% of the total budget and generated 30% of total traffic to the site). Amazon.com and Google have affiliate advertising programmes for bloggers. General Motors, Disney, Sony and others are using blogs to build brand loyalty, encourage credible feedback and collaborate internally. In South Africa, the Mail & Guardian and M-Web sites have launched very successful blogging communities. If you're not blogging, you're not relevant. You're not part of the conversation. Your customers and clients are no longer happy to be passive, brain-washed consumer lemmings. They want to participate, initiate, collaborate, and most significantly, create. And therein lies the phenomenal power of blogging. It affords Joe Public the opportunity to publish quality content to the Web for a global audience regardless of technical background or financial resource.

The blogosphere's growth curve is not showing any signs of slowing down either. In March, 2003, Technorati (the Google equivalent for blogs) listed 100,000 blogs on the Web. By March this year, just two years on, that number had exploded to 7.8 million. Six months later, in August, Technorati's report shocked the online world when it documented a total of 15.4 million blogs. At the current rate of expansion, the blogosphere doubles in size every five months. Each day just fewer than 200 000 blogs are added to the list. By the end of this year there will be 35 million blogs in existence.

There is a pressing air of defensiveness and obstinacy regarding shifts happening in the global marketing and advertising space. Consumer-generated media has journalists and public relations professionals paranoid about the future of their industry, and their jobs. Newspapers are turning to indie reporters for breaking localized stories. How will you choose to respond? Where will you position yourself? Why not be proactive? Why not face the challenge head on and exploit the opportunities? If you're feeling out of the loop, it's because you are. Get out of your comfort zone, try something dangerous, learn something new. Your company needs to change the way it communicates with employees, suppliers and clients. The old rules have changed. The good news is, you still have time to act. Remember, business tracks societal trends, because that's where the market is. Regardless of whether you choose to blog or not, accept the likelihood that someone is blogging about you.

Finally, if nothing else I've said makes sense, consider this: currently 200 000 new blogs are created daily. If 99.99% of those are absolute crap, you're still left with 20 relevant, useful, vibrant and effectual websites that could be making a difference to the way you work. Shouldn't you be looking for them?