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While the development of independent and niche publishers has been pervasive with some taking the editorial mantel of expertise and influence from mainstream media, the financial prospects of power bloggers are not at all clear, says Jason Pontin, editor and publisher MIT's Technology Review. Jason was the longtime editor of Red Herring which chronicled the last tech/media boom. Jason believes that niche publishers need to adopt a multi-level approach to revenue generation.

Transcript

Technology Review's Jason Pontin on Power Blogging If you look at the economics behind blogs, something perhaps more serious is going on as well. So, sure, there have been big media companies before around certain personalities and yet they manage to grow beyond those personalities because there actually was a business model supporting them. The problem with blog is that even the most wildly successful ones like the Daily Dish by Andrew Sullivan, they’re not actually bringing in huge, huge revenues. The CPM, they're getting it. They cost for thousand. For page impressions, they're still relatively, relatively small. So, not only are they attached to individual personalities like Nick Denton, like Omalik but they aren’t really in a position where they can begin to grow and make capital investments to really expand into proper media companies. GigaOM which is probably the best example. So you begin with a personalized blog and try to grow bigger, had I think two of the full-time reporters and staff and some support staff but it was still very much owned. I believe it’s across the internet media space if small, smaller size which are the delivering under a million or between a million to three million uniques a month can begin to demand serious CPMs from a large number of repeat advertisers. And by serious CPMS, I mean 25, something like that. I don’t think these are sustainable businesses. At the moment, almost all the most successful online brands, even if they have huge traffic tend to go and support those online businesses with additional products either print or events or the like. It’s very difficult at the moment to support an online ground by itself. At the same time the traditional print advertisement is collapsing, sponsorship advertisement events isn’t much healthier. So we’re in a -- this is like the general theme of my remarks. We’re in a very uncomfortable position in publishing at the moment. We all know that audience behavior and advertiser demand is driving publishing online, you need the dollars onto there. And in some point, we’re going it hit an inflection point, a crossover where there’s no money left basically in the old business. And there’s not yet enough new money in the new business. And if we can't work out our way between media buyers, the advertisers, aggregators like Google and publishers like me to value content creation then, we’re going to hit a wall. And it's not going to benefit anyone.