Digitella left Tek’s office, clutching her backpack and thinking about their conversation. She wasn’t sure it was so easy to let the blog/ journalism debate go, but for now she had to. She did believe that there were more important issues to look at – but what?
“How much are you going to worship me?” Mo said, tapping Digitella on the shoulder. Shoving her wide-rimmed glasses up her nose, Mo handed Digitella a printed piece of paper. Digitella read it and laughed. “Wow, my dear, you are fabulous! How do you find this stuff?”
“Just call me Moogle!” she giggled, skipping down the corridor.
Digitella found a shady spot on one of the campus lawns and eagerly pulled her laptop out from her backpack:
“We are all under the impression that citizen journalists don’t make much money – especially online citizen journalists. Unless you sell your content to news sites like Reporter.co.za or Ohmynews (whose pay won’t even cover the cost of your dial-up connection) you probably won’t make any money. Blogs, especially, are notoriously non-profitable.
But, wait … there have been hushed whispers and stirrings in the SA advertising world. It seems that advertisers have finally cottoned on to the fact that online media is popular and that more and more people are going online (people with money to spend that is).
I just read an article that said in the past two months aggregator site Amatomu has registered 350 000 outbound clicks to SA blogs – impressive. But, that wasn’t what caught my eye. Apparently, the company is planning to establish an advertising network that will share revenues with top blogs. Maher says that Amatomu wants to bring advertising to the blogosphere … Hmmm. Do I smell more trouble for traditional media?
An article I recently read says that Google currently has SA’s biggest market share in terms of online advertising. Its easy-to-use advertising model lets small-fry advertisers who can’t afford to place ads in big media advertise via Google on small websites and blogs. Google coughs up money every time a person clicks on an ad they are carrying. This lets bloggers make a few rands off their sites and with hundreds of thousands of registered blogs in SA, the amount of revenue generated could be HUGE. This could mean bad news for traditional media.
The bulk of traditional media’s money comes from advertising and if advertisers are going to take their money online, newspapers and magazines are in for a rough ride. This is just one more reason for traditional media organisations to tap into online media – and fast. In my opinion, if newspapers do not want to lose their advertising they need to create a website (even if it is a tad archaic), just to get their foot in the door and to hold on for dear life to their very life source. We can’t ignore the digital age any more – money is power and the power is slowly shifting.
Wake up.”
Digitella posted the entry and found herself humming the lyrics from an old song … “It’s all about the money. It’s all about the dum dum da da dad um. It’s all about the money.” Indeed it is …
Due to Cricket - Citizen Media: the Days of OUR Online Lives will not be posted for the next few weeks.
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1 comment:
Well said. South African TrafficSynergy Affiliate Network including its adRands product is already being used by South African bloggers to monetise their blogs.
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