ZDNet revealed last week that PayPerPost will target the top 100 bloggers with the rollout of a new system upgrade geared towards advertising segmentation and offering a new standardized disclosure policy that will trigger BubbleAds to appear when a user hovers over the disclosure badge in an article.

The increase in disclosure and transparency are noble advances in the correct ethical direction. 

However, Considering the PayPerPost business model, how will targeting their system towards the top 100 bloggers further business?

The Top 100 Blogs according to Technorati achieve their rank primarily according to the number of other blogs that link in to them.  At the high end of the 100 Engadget has 25,682 unique blogs linking in and at the low end the blog that has no English name has 2,995 blogs linking in.  For the sake of comparison, there is currently at least one blog in the PayPerPost network that has about 1,300 blogs linking in.  While this blog (Maven Mapper’s Information)  has 145 blogs linking in according to Technorati.

But what exactly will a new disclosure policy and a new ad delivery engine do to entice a blog like Engadget to seek sponsors from the same poll that Maven Mapper utilizes?

That I do not know and do not understand.  I do understand that one of the great powers of the type of Buzz Management or Internet Marketing 2.0 services that PayPerPost and many of its competitors such as Blogitive, Blogsvertise, LoudLaunch, iWebTools and others provide is the ability to connect advertisers with the leveraged power of thousands of bloggers and websites. 

Content is King on the internet and the strength in this model is in the vast army of content producers.  The Queen of course is Search.  If you cannot find the content then the king will be dethroned.  Building web buzz by leveraging the masses through both their discussions and their links is the second strength of this model. 

The fact that these services combine the power of the masses from all around the globe to generate content and push that content up such that it can be found is amazing.  Not to mention the fact that these blogs take their advertising sponsors and their keywords with them on that upwards journey in the Search engines.  This is truly where the power of the model comes into play.

The top 100 bloggers already have the ability to illuminate content they deem worthy, by shining a Google Page Rank 8 mega spot light towards a website or advertisers promotional link (using Engadget and Boing Boing PR examples).  They do not need a middle man.

From an advertisers perspective it would be the equivalent of purchasing a Super Bowl commercial from your local TV stations ad agency, and who does that? 

The top 100 bloggers cover their advertising sales and placements very well already.  Similarly, speaking companies that can afford a big ad spend are typically going to be covered in relationships already. 

The Real Penetrating Power of Buzz Management

PayPerPost can offer a buzz coverage and band width that is phenomenal (rumored to be over 10,000 blogs and growing every month).  Would a big company like to hit the same 100 blogs they are all ready hitting through a new middle man, or would they like to get access to the marketing bandwidth of 10,000+ bloggers downstream?  (Multiply that by two or three and elliminate duplicates to consider the entire industry.)

In the long tail model the theory goes that if you have blogs that have an average of 500 visitors a day (some on the low side an some much higher).  10,000 bloggers will bring you 5 million hits per day.  With an average ad spend of $10 per ad (including fees), a big advertiser could run a single campaign for $100k (10 x 10,000) across all 10,000 blogs.  Plus that is with an ad that is relatively permanent.  It will likely be there until the demise of the blog.  There are blogs that are in the top 500 that charge that kind of money for a single weeks worth of ads, with daily hits in the 1 million range.

An advertiser can get 35 million eyes on their ad in 1 week for $100k through PPP theoretically in the first week and long tail eyes for months and years to come compared to 7 million eyes through traditional top blogs.

So what happens to the bloggers in the long tail of the blogosphere when the service refocuses on the nub of the tail? 

The risk is that the long tail will be neglected.  Unless the systems and organization are built out to cover the long tail needs in an automated and streamlined manner.  Instead of focusing on growing the blogger base from 10,000 to 50,000 or 100,000, PayPerPost seems to be opting to push up the average ad rate for top blogs chasing after someone else’s pie.

Step in the Right Direction

Now to their credit PayPerPost is working to put on a mass training event called Postie Con in Orlando next summer.  The event will bring some of the PPP Army of bloggers to learn new trends, improve their skills, grow their blogging business and increase the quality and effectiveness of their work.  This is excellent.  Analogizing the blogger masses to the elite 100 blogs, this is taking the grass roots, growing the yard larger and fertilizing it to nurture a healthy ecosystem.  Importing a patch or two of high quality sod however, will only stick out like a sore thumb and prove a distraction.

PayPerPost and the other Buzz Management organization should be pushing their network of writers, which I refer to as a Writer’s Collaborative.  The push should be towards improvement and growth.   With these simple Goals:

1. Establish more segmented blogs
2. Write Better
3. Write more (but spread on the additional blogs)
4. Optimize, Promote, and Grow Readership and Subscribers
5. Reform the long skinny tail into a muscular fat wagging tail capable of shaking up the internet with every swing!

To accomplish this, the Buzz Management industry needs to sponsor more education and provide more support for their ecosystem.  Possibly even utilizing technology found in common elearning solutions and virtual conventions such as the EcomExpo.

Closing Perspective

The world is closing in on 10 billion people.  The United States will likely hit 400 million people in the next 15- 20 years.  A network of 100,000 experience content producers five years from now could significantly shake up the world of media as we know it.   That would be 1 content producer for every 100,000 people world wide.

The Missing Dynamic - Collaboration

Let me also offer that this is just one aspect of the dynamic taking hold on the internet.  These numbers all assume that the content producers are working in a vacuum.  If you add in the other major trend the internet has enabled, and these producers collaborate, well then you have an entirely different topic and a much different entertainment, news, education and information industry.

For more Information:  See ZDNet Article PayPerPost to Launch disclosure badges, new tools; targets top 100 bloggers by Larry Dignan - January 30, 2007.

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James Gray, a winner of the Turing Award and Microsoft researcher, has been missing since January 28th after he went sailing to scatter his mother’s ashes on a set of islands near San Francisco Bay.

Private planes and the US Coast Guard searched but found nothing, so friends and family gathered their tech resources together.  A collaboration of NASA, Amazon, Google and Microsoft brought together satellite and high-altitude reconnaissance pictures.  These photographs were loaded up to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and through a website shared on the net so that volunteers could help to review the pictures and flag potential tiles of pictures for experts to review. 

Over 100,000 photographs and counting have been reviewed so far, but James has not been found yet.  The collaboration and use of technology however stand as a very interesting monument to the support to help James and the potential of bringing together people through online resources.  As a former intelligence analyst, I find it extremely impressive how many images could be reviewed in a short amount of time by so many people.  The effort is amazing.

here is an example of what volunteers are able to do as they can through the images.

A user will sign in to Amazon, review the picture quickly, accept it if they want to officially review it, then click yes or no if they see something or not.  Plus they can write in a comment if they need to for the experts review.

Join the Search

I only hope that Mr. Gray will be found or rescued safely.

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