Blade encounters an excellent analysis of the UK’s rather hesitant embrace of blog publishing. It’s by Ashley Norris, former co-founder of early UK blog network Shiny Media, and can be found here at TechCrunch. Its publication neatly coincides with research soon to be unveiled here on Swordplay on Web 2.0 and the professions. Incidentally, Blade also believes that the Times is soon to tackle the thorny topic of whether blogs are of use to the legal professions, so too that Independent Lawyer magazine is shortly to analyze Web 2.0 applications generally and their interaction with the law.
So, Norris’s piece is timely. Given its inherent fidelity to the democratic and collaborative nature of the Web 2.0 world, here at Swordplay we assume that Norris will not object to the republication of his opening two scene-setting paragraphs:
The last five years have seen an explosion in the number of independent commercial blogs, blog networks and websites in the US. The Huffington Post, Sugar Publishing, Perez Hilton, Gawker Media, Engadget - the list goes on forever, and they are just the Web 2.0 premiership. There are thousands of individuals running less high profile blogs and websites who are making a significant living from their work.
In the UK it is a depressingly different story. I have spent the last five years of my life developing Shiny Media, the largest and most successful UK blog network. When I left the company at the end of August it could boast that over four million people each month were either reading or viewing its content. Shiny Media is however one of a handful of independent UK content companies to attract more than a couple of million monthly readers to its sites. There are some amazing blogs and sites out there, Hecklerspray, Anorak, The Spoiler, Coolest Gadgets, Unreality TV and Pocket-Lint spring to mind, but of those only one can claim more than a million monthly readers.
Why, then, the slow uptake? And what of the future? Norris identifies a number of factors to explain why blog publishing here lags behind that in the United States. For starters, he says we shouldn’t forget the limited audience compared to life across the pond: “US sites have at least five times more readers to aim at and that counts for an awful lot when most online advertising is still based around a CPM model (advertisers pay a between 50p-£20 depending on the campaign per thousand people who see their ad).”
More contentiously, he says that lack of imagination in the ad industry is a major problem: “Shiny has been very successful at attracting blue chip brand advertising (Marks and Spencer, Nokia, Dyson, BMW are among the high profile brands who have advertised on its sites). However it has been a long and slow process convincing agencies and brands to advertise on blogs… many brands and their agency planers have chosen to play it safe and will work with established media brands or mega portals like MSN, even when the ads themselves will be seen by a less focussed and often an inappropriate audience. There are signs that this is changing, but the lack of brand advertising on sites like Hecklerspray and Unreality TV really is baffling.”
A third factor, according to Norris, is the lack of UK media entrepreneurs. He makes the nigh on unarguable point that many well-known UK blogs have been written by freelance journalists as a sideline, rather than developed with serious entrepreneurial backing. This is fine so far as it goes, but it might not be very far: “This is ideal for slowly building an audience, but the emphasis is on the word slowly.”
Analogously, Norris cites lack of VC support: “As a rule European VCs don’t tend to be too interested in media unless it is supported by a technological innovation… Conversely organisations like Next New Networks , the closest US equivalent of Shiny, has several VCs on its board and has so far attracted over $23m in funding. Established US media has also worked with independent new media companies too. NBC has equity in Sugar Publishing, another Shiny rival, while The Discovery Channel acquired Treehugger the leading green blog.”
Fifth, Norris says that too much competition could be salient. I.e., readers here are loyal to, rather than mistrustful of, the established media in all its glory.
Last, Norris points the finger at Auntie: “At the risk of sounding like a stuck record the existence of the BBC and its hugely impressive range of online services does make life even more tricky for the independents. Going back to point one there is only a certain number of UK web surfers and as the BBC hoovers up a large percentage of them the slice of the cake for the independents is even smaller. Secondly, the BBC’s reluctance to link to British blogs and smaller independent media organisations, while at the same time endlessly plugging established media groups (Five Live is one long plug for mainstream media brands) makes life even more difficult.”
Swordplay’s White Paper, The Laity Bytes Back?, is in sync with Norris in identifying a significant difference between the US capitalization on new media opportunities as opposed to the UK professions’ conservative stance to date. But as our White Paper argues, the Web 2.0 world isn’t going to go away, and those who seize the moment now are likely to be sitting pretty in years to come. This, indeed, is true despite the credit crunch, and despite a discernible weariness, Norris himself remains optimistic about blog publishing in the UK. For as he concludes:
Finally it is worth adding that the economic downturn might actually provide some interesting opportunities for UK bloggers. Several of the most successful indie websites date from around 2002/2003, a time when mainstream media was pulling out of the web after the dot com crash. It is possible that 2009 will go down as the year in which the third wave of indie media started gaining momentum. Here’s hoping.
I think Norris’ analysis is completely wrong. For one shiny publishes the most banal content (no wonder the slow uptake).
What Norris also fails to mention is that there are certain huge sites out there like Environmental Graffiti and Mashable that are UK-based and are fully fledged businesses. The main difference with these sites it seems is that they are US-facing.
Just my two cents.
I find it slightly odd that successful blogs are invariably deemed to be those with a wide readership.
This is like deeming a website to be successful if it has loads of visitors. But if they come, visit and do not engage, purchase or advocate the business of what value are they?
Many of those who start blogs to support a business venture don’t seem to stay the course. It can take time to build up a loyal RELEVANT readership base. This may not be an objective. Instead you may simply want to create relevant readable and changing content to enhance the SEO of your website.
Many businesses look at blogging as time consuming and difficult to maintain and manage. They start very enthusiastically but fade away after a few months as they can’t identify any ongoing business benefit.
I’d like to think I’m bucking the trend. I’ve been blogging regularly for over two years and am showing no signs of running out of material. Indeed a couple of months back I added a third regular blog to my portfolio.
For the record you can find my blogs at:
http://www.TaxAdviceNetwork.co.uk/blog – Tax commentary, ideas, insights and news;
BookMarkLee.wordpress.com – Tips and advice for ambitious accountants;
http://www.Accoutant-jokes.com – Accountancy related jokes, stories, videos and more
Thanks Mark for your comments – with which Blade completely agrees. Evaluation of a blog’s merits should not be by virtue of numbers alone. Sadly, however, this is the way in which a great many newspapers are now looking at their blogs, as they seek to claim ‘most read’ status. The Times, for example, has recently culled a number of its niche blogs, precisely because they don’t transcend their niches.
Is this the logical outcome of the democracy of the blogosphere, or is it a case of cynicism on Fleet Street?
Interesting times, these, in the life of Joey Barton.
If the violence displayed by the QPR captain at Manchester City last Sunday was remarkable, his subsequent conduct on Twitter has been astonishing. Barton appears to have radically reinterpreted the notion that attack is the best form of defence, lashing out at all and sundry via a series of tweets whose ultimate effect is entirely self-destructive.
In the past 24 hours, Barton has accepted one charge of violent conduct at the Etihad Stadium but denied another. The FA seems set to throw the book at him, and his club has declared that it will deal with the matter after the result of the FA investigation. Conspiracy theorists might conclude that QPR’s management team and board hope that the FA ban Barton for so long a period (four months and more) that their reported desire to rip up his contract can only be bolstered.
What, then, should Barton do? Should he:
(a) Keep his head down and say nothing, or
(b) Issue a sensible statement in which he acknowledges that both his conduct at the Etihad and subsequent tweets have brought QPR into disrepute, and
(c) Add an apology to said statement, or
(d) Go to Portugal, log onto Twitter and tweet that the world is against him but that he doesn’t care because everyone is a moron and he’s worked really hard to get where he is and if anyone is nasty to him again he is going to expose their secrets.
The answer is not (d).
The moral of the story is that if you’re a loose cannon, when you turn attack into defence there is a danger that you will blow yourself up.
A fine piece, this, on Winston Churchill’s gift for language and the obscurantism that goes with so much corporate communication.
But wait, what’s this? Could this injunction have been phrased rather more successfully:
Be concrete, not abstract. Use metaphors to get your message across.
Metaphors are, by definition, not exactly concrete. But be that as it may: there is a lot of sound advice in Clare Lynch’s piece and a revelation, too. We had never heard of the Gunning Fog Index. But it exists, and reveals the age at which someone would have to leave full-time education to understand given text.
We’re pleased to display our own Gunning Fog rating for the above words. That of the Churchill speech cited by Ms Lynch was 9.698.
The idea that Lord Justice Leveson and his Inquiry’s QC, Robert Jay, are in need of PR advice is intriguing.
Surely their respective tasks ought to be immune from spin? Then again, perhaps the way in which they execute them is deserving of some communications advice. Either way, times have changed. A similar inquiry from yesteryear (and such do exist) would surely not have been accompanied, albeit informally, by communications advice.
Pictured courtesy of this Flickr user: a portrait of the Leveson Inquiry.
Is there a geek inside all of us?
Excellent Nike ad
Memo to would-be hacks: good writing is no longer a tool of your trade
Released almost a year ago, Spada’s groundbreaking research report, British Professions Today, is available for free download
This bank is so well designed that many of its staff never go home (allegedly)
In the latest of our series of white papers, Spada Research examines trends in environmental reporting.
If you become a star, you don’t change – everyone else does. Kirk Douglas, 1916 – present, American actor.