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Blawgs and Order: American Lawyer
Media Leverages Personal Content for Profits |
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29 November 2004 |
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American Lawyer Media recently launched its Law.com Blog
Network, a network of independent weblogs focusing on legal
topics that takes ads and links from Law.com and that get
covered in Law.com's own "blog of blogs". This symbiotic
relationship points to a new positioning for trade journals
and other publications that are trying to extend their
reach for advertisers that need not compromise their
current editorial efforts and that can extend their reach
into their core communities for both profits and
credibility. It's time for publishers and aggregators of
all kinds to recognize that weblogs and other personal
content are the vehicles that find highly monetizable
personal contexts more efficiently than any other content
today. |
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It's funny
to listen when journalists and analysts hem and haw about
whether weblogs are having any significant impact on the "real"
B2B publishing world. "Fine for flashy media types and gossips,
but for hardcore professionals? Certainly not." The truth is
that professionals in many fields have had well cranked-up
weblog presences for some time. Lawyers write some of the most
widely read and respected weblogs written by professionals, a
trend that has caught the attention of
American Lawyer Media, publisher of the
Law.com web
site and an increasingly aggressive acquirer of new sources of
content. ALM's
VerdictSearch portal is already a highly successful premium
source of verdict, settlement and arbitration information built
largely from submissions volunteered from the legal community,
so it's not surprising that they've
announced a new effort to capture this community's input
via law weblogs, sometimes referred to as "blawgs."
The
Law.com Blog Network provides a "blog of blawgs" for
the legal community, along with direct links to eight affiliate
legal weblogs that use advertising and headline links provided
by Law.com. These weblogs cover a wide range of topics and
outlooks, some of them rather chatty and wide-ranging such as
May it Please the Court and others highly focused on
specific topics of interest such as
MyShingle.com, which covers the ins and outs of small
legal practices. It's independent coverage in every sense, but
with the links out from and into ALM content ALM has managed to
embrace the weblog community rather than ignore it and to
provide both monetization and relationship-building through
these ads and links that creates a far richer tapestry of
relationships with their core community. Taken together it's a
fabric of content that provides the already-rich and
progressive Law.com site with a very personalized reach into
the law community that is both authentic and easily
attuned to new voices that gain respect within that community.
While this content is not designed in any
way to displace ALM's core editorial and database content, it's
availability as a channel of respected content points to some
key lessons that are being learned as the era of
The New Aggregation unfolds. What best practices are
emerging from direct and affiliate blogging efforts such as
ALM's? Here are a few key thoughts:
- Publishing for a professional
community is far more than journalism and databases. It
takes far more than good reportage and well-groomed databases
to succeed as a professional publisher in an era when
accomplished professionals can communicate with one another
directly with complete ease. The ability of webloggers to
connect their audiences with relevant content via links in
many ways supercedes the traditional flow of editorial
control exercised in the traditional journalism model as
users begin to create their own desktop aggregations of
relevant content from an array of weblogs and content
providers. The carefully crafted voices of a given industry
expressed through traditional editorials, columnists and
reportage are giving way to the voices of the industry
itself, communicating with high efficiency and authority on a
wide array of topics. Authentic content recognized by a given
community is the key to content monetization in today's
publishing marketplace, regardless of how it's sourced.
Tomorrow's trade journals are going to be far less about the
reportage model and far more about those channels best
equipped to service the diverse communications needs of
professionals in given communities and contexts.
- Weblogs as affiliate marketing
channels work well for both the sponsor and the sponsee.
Notably the ALM weblog model is a true network of content,
using the ALM portal as a link centre and weblog guide but
leaving the individual weblogs "as is" with ALM ads and links
to ALM content. The ALM site offers the webloggers a valuable
editorial and link context for their content, and in turn the
webloggers' sites offer an affiliate distribution channel for
ALM advertisers in a highly valued context. While ad
placement networks such as Google's AdSense are useful
channels for generalized advertising efforts, one of the
potentially strong futures for trade journals is deploying
their advertising bases into independent content channels
such as weblogs to provide a highly focused audience in
extremely "sticky" contexts. If good content is where you
find it, trade journals may be becoming more about hunting
out good contexts for monetization in many network venues
than trying to squeeze out more from a captive source of
editorial value. Instead of using ad networks, journals and
papers may become the ad networks - or vice versa.
- The question of how to monetize
weblogs seems to be getting answered fairly definitively.
The ability to imbed ads from networks in weblogs was already
a given, but the ability to do this in conjunction with an
established publication on an affiliate basis offers an
innovative approach to weblog monetization that promises
stable sponsorship that amplifies the brand value of a weblog
far more than a pure ad network could manage. Unlike the old
media-oriented production company model, near-zero production
investments allows weblogs to be cranked out no matter who
comes along to monetize them, a little like the early folk
and blues musicians playing along whether an
Alan Lomax came to discover them or not. Like Alan Lomax
early weblog impressarios such as Jason Calacanis and Nick
Denton have done a good job in surfacing and developing
weblog talent for monetization, but in most instances the
need for middle-market figures to play this role is minimal
when a given community has defined for themselves who's worth
reading. Established publishers are well-placed to become
their own talent scouts and cut their own deals with
independent content producers such as "blawgers" that service
a well-defined community, creating stable and mutual monetary
benefits.
The Law.com Blog Network offers a great
template for publishers in many industries to consider how they
can use content generated by their communities to create a
high-value network of content for monetization. It may not be
your father's trade journalism, but the results of this new
order for law journals are likely to please your father's bank
account.
-
John Blossom
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