Burgeoning blog factory B5 Media gets funded, that sound you hear is the longtail getting kicked out the door

Well congrats to B5, they just got a big check today. They now have their shot at being the next incarnation of Big Media. B5, if you don’t know, publishes blogs, a lot of blogs, for-profit. So this deal is interesting for a number of reasons:

1. That they needed the money. I guess the google adsense cheques just aren’t quite covering it yet. They needed to raise a VC round rather than just growing on current revenues or banking on those revenues to raise any easier forms of debt/equity.

2. Be ready for the onslaught of factory blogs and the professionalization of the blogging medium. Blogs are no more the Amateur Revolution upturning mainstream media, the blogosphere now becoming just another flavour of MSM itself. That sound you hear is the long tail straining as the head the head of the pack pulls away pulls further away from the rest. You had to see this coming (hence Rick&co. aren’t wrong on this one). Caveat though, 5 years from now you just know people will be out there protesting as all the top blogs are being churned out by out-sourced, over-worked, (freakishly)over-literate, under-fed child laborers in Bangladesh…

3. Get ready for the bifurcation of the blogosphere. If you haven’t noticed already, the new “A list” is in it for very different reasons than “your sister’s blog”. Your sister is in it to post cute pictures of her cat/kitten/niece/trip-to-france and to stay connected to her loose but still immediate network of friends, family, colleagues, ex-lovers… and so forth. B5 is in it to pay its bloggers $10/post 4 per day minimum, and on any subject that might steal any susceptible second of your attention and Google click through likelihood.

Meh, and me? I just in it to get more people in this world listening to the “right” kind of music…

Update: Duncan from B5 writes in (see comments), B5 doesn’t pay their bloggers per post as I suggested (perhaps revshare makes more sense?). In any case I must have been thinking of stories of a certain other blog network out there. And according to Duncan, adsense is not their primary source of revenue (good to hear their revenues streams are diversified, too heavy a reliance one or two adnetworks has been the downfall of other webmasters).

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4 Responses to Burgeoning blog factory B5 Media gets funded, that sound you hear is the longtail getting kicked out the door

  1. Duncan says:

    Just a note on the Adsense side, Adsense hasn’t been our main source of income for a long time, indeed today it’s less that 10% and still dropping, and sure, it does pay well on some blogs and does fill inventory well at times, but anyone who is working on the basis that Adsense is their main source of revenue isn’t looking at the bigger picture.

    We only need the money in terms of taking us to the next level, we’ve been in existence for 12 months, and it’s public knowledge that we’ve been profitable for the last 9 of those months. End of the day even if we didn’t take funding we would have continued to grow, this funding just gives us the ability to grow more quickly by being able to afford upfront to bring in new/ additional talent to assist us in that growth, for example a dedicated sales professional.

    Interesting on your ideas for paying our bloggers…that’s no where even close to our compensation structure..but you can’t win them all I guess.

  2. Duncan says:

    Just a note on the Adsense side, Adsense hasn’t been our main source of income for a long time, indeed today it’s less that 10% and still dropping, and sure, it does pay well on some blogs and does fill inventory well at times, but anyone who is working on the basis that Adsense is their main source of revenue isn’t looking at the bigger picture.

    We only need the money in terms of taking us to the next level, we’ve been in existence for 12 months, and it’s public knowledge that we’ve been profitable for the last 9 of those months. End of the day even if we didn’t take funding we would have continued to grow, this funding just gives us the ability to grow more quickly by being able to afford upfront to bring in new/ additional talent to assist us in that growth, for example a dedicated sales professional.

    Interesting on your ideas for paying our bloggers…that’s no where even close to our compensation structure..but you can’t win them all I guess.

  3. hey cool, thanks for stopping by. What are your primary sources of income anyhow?

  4. hey cool, thanks for stopping by. What are your primary sources of income anyhow?

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