New Media

My Christmas List: #1 A Viable Revenue Model for the Blogosphere

By Maegan Carberry ⋅ October 31, 2008 ⋅   Email this post ⋅  Digg This ⋅  Share on Facebook ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

It was a particularly depressing week for journalists; I was tempted to turn Romenesko off my Twitter feed, since I kept waking up each morning to more sky-is-falling news about the future of the industry. (Check out his page; it’s a fantastically aggregated downer of all you need to know.) As my last E&P column espoused, my friends and colleagues are feeling the anxiety in a maybe-I-should-get-into-PR-or-go-back-to-grad-school kind of way.

It’s an exciting time, though, for the blogosphere. More than ever it seems like this evolving trade may finally be on the verge of defeating it’s primary adversary: revenue. Next week after the election I’m heading up to the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco to participate in a broad conversation about the future role of the internet in public life, and I’m particularly excited to attend this workshop on the transition of offline dollars to online enterprises. Most of the predictors I read forecast that CPMs won’t increase for another decade, but I believe the election coverage has made the momentum shift readily obvious.

This leads me to believe that I might actually have decent health insurance again by the time Barackstar runs for re-election. (Fingers crossed.)