The old media model and the new blog one – advertising, ‘own logo’ and the future of the net economy

Reading the comments on this problogger post today the blindingly obvious occurred to me, namely that the blog-with-ads model is no different, really, to the current media models we have in place.

Essentially writers / broadcasters publish their work, try to get as big as readership as possible, and get advertising revenue through that. OK, ad revenue may be click through, there may well be narrowcasting involved and it’s on a different scale but essentially that’s it.

And fair play to them too! I think really if you’re going to start criticising blogs running ads, trying to get more readers / ad revenue and trying to make a living out of this then you’d better be eschewing that copy of the Times, Wired, and whatever other publication you might read. Heck, I’d forget about that visit to the news website you frequent… it’ll only be the bbc now for you baby!

But having said that it doesn’t mean that there isn’t a new model here, in a very commercial sense, and it’s with a heavy dash of irony that in this instance I’m drawing upon HobbyPrincess’s ‘Own Logo‘ concept.

For those of you that haven’t read No Logo (here’s the blog!) it’s a great rollicking vitriol against modern corporate culture and exploitation. It’s also a great introduction to brand management and marketing ) But I digress, ‘Own Logo’ is, according to HP in a fashion sense:

“a form of self-expression – partly by rejecting readymade mainstream designs offered by global fashion brands, but also (perhaps more interestingly) by inventing new designs of their own.

An essential aspect of the own logo phenomenon is the branding of one’s own creations. Many of the people who have started to make their own designs (including me and my friends) want to tag their creations with their own symbol.”

And I think that this has huge import for blogs.

In creating our digital identity through blogging we are branding ourselves, creating our own logos and this leads to an interesting long tail economical model (and a not so long tail one too). We don’t necessarily have to blog with ads as we can just as easily get a living through selling crafts, providing consultancy, getting gigs, publishing our books or finding people that think we’re smart enough to hire.

The problem with the old model is that it only scales to a certain degree. There will be saturation, money will spread out, the reliance on advertisers whims (especially google) is too high and you’re also chasing something that the big & established media giants might well take from you very soon (Vogue doesn’t get its online readership from it’s great web presence!)

The new model, however, can be localised, niched, doesn’t require ‘mass’ readership to hit it off (after all, how many hours of the day can you work) and doesn’t have you up against any great big companies or established practices… because we’re the first people doing this.

‘Own logo’ works. Credit to the blog-ads people but there’s a far more exciting opportunity out here if you ask me.