Pajamas Media and the Undying Dream of Crazy Blog Money

Again, this is of primary interest to bloggers, but I suppose anyone interested in seeing a business model that will help the, err, Shadow Media compete with the MSM might want to read Right Wing News' interview with Marc Danzinger of Pajamas Media:

John Hawkins: Now the banner ads wouldn't be competing with blogads. I've had banner ads and blogads on my blog for more than a year, for example. But, the side ads would. So it would be fair to say you're competing directly with blogads right out of the blocks?

Marc Danziger: For that real estate, perhaps. But, people run Google ads and blog ads in sidebars without anyone's brains melting, so I assume we could, too.

...

John Hawkins: Want to give any general idea of what sort of rates you think you can get or is it too early?

Marc Danziger: Too early, but we've been talking to major ad-serving companies and international advertising agencies and haven't been laughed out of the room.

...

John Hawkins: Last question: When does Pajamas Media go live?

Marc Danziger: Depends. We have ad contracts ready to sign. The limiting issues right now are two: we need to get the various investor groups to sign off on the actual contracts we will be sending out for blogs to sign and we need to get insured. We're being underwritten, but we're different enough from the traditional ad networks that it's a bit of a pain. So the soonest date would be a week from Monday (we'd go out with contracts and code to insert ads) and start running ads within days after that. Worst case is about ten days later barring some disastrous news.

This Probably Means Something But I Don't Know What Update: The Hundred Percenter finds that overall blog readership has increased 13% in the first quarter of this year, after falling off steeply after the elections.

I've gained 13%, apparently. Which puts me right where I want to be. Average. A solid C-student and damn proud of it.

Among those losing the most readers are Andrew Sullivan and Oliver Willis. Wizbang, a partner in the Sullivan Freak-Out Advisory, also lost a lot of readers, but that's because he had monster traffic in January.

Well, okay, Willis appears to have had a monster January, too.

Blog traffic, for all but the biggest blogs, is highly volatile, as the difference between a monster week or month is just a couple of nearly-random links from bigger blogs. So, I'm not sure how much to read into any of this.

posted by Ace at 12:10 PM

| Access Comments