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Professional Blogging News

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Giga Omni Leaves Federated For IDG Ad NetworkNovember 22

Om Malik.

Giga Omni Media, the technology blog network led by Om Malik, Friday ended its three-year advertising agreement with upscale Federated Media, announcing a new deal with IDG.

In statements, the two parties attempted to put the split in the best possible light. However, the move may be the result of Federated’s recently offering advertisers discounts.

In response to Gig Omni leaving the Federated fold, FM Publisher Charles Edwards told CNET Giga Omni’s seven sites no longer fit its network profile.

“The Federated Media approach is the Conde Nast or Time Inc. approach. Our model has not been well-suited to take those smaller sites where they want to go,” Edwards said.

For his part, Malik said the two companies had diverged.

“As our needs became more specialized, we sat down with the folks at Federated to try and figure out how we could continue to work together,” he wrote in a blog post.

“Both sides quickly realized that instead it was time to wrap up what has been a successful business relationship,” Malik announced.

Friday,

Six Apart Founders Head To Disneyland Amid Company’s Job CutsNovember 15

File this under “poor timing.” Six Apart co-founder Mena Trott surprised husband and co-founder Ben Trott with what was described as an “irony-free trip to Disneyland” by Valleywag Editor Owen Thomas Saturday.

The irony is that Tuesday, the San Francisco, Calif. blog company cut 16 of its 200 employees.

“I’m so bad with surprises: I couldn’t resist telling Ben that I planned a last-minute trip for us to Disneyland,” Men Trott told her Twitter audience Friday.

A day at Disneyland might relieve some of the stress as ever more tech companies fall victim to the poor economy. However, such a move carries with it a public stigma, much like the PR nightmare AIG exec’s found themselves earlier this week in trying to explain a posh sales dinner while receiving billions in public bailouts.

(Photo: Jackson West)

Get Back To Blogging Basics, B5Media CEO AdvisesNovember 14

Big media. Once anathema to the blogging culture, traditional media, derided as “mainstream media” is now seen as a potential savior of blogs big and small during the current economic crisis. Otherwise, bloggers will be destroyed, one network CEO advises.

“Blog networks today are, fundamentally, media businesses,” Jeremy Wright, CEO of the Canadian-based b5media, told Blog Herald. As a media company, blog networks must attract larger audiences, keep them involved and expand revenue potential beyond Google’s Adsense.

Wright said in order to survive, blog networks need to be earning more than $20,000 per month.

“For that type of blog network that doesn’t have revenue, scale [and] growth, the current environment is going to be devastating,” the b5media head told Thord Daniel Hedengren.

Like Gawker Media CEO Nick Denton, Wright is a fan of looking for revenue other than advertising and outsourcing. A number of blog networks, such as TechCrunch and Giga Omni Media, have found conferences as a dependable source of revenue.

Possibly the hardest-hit will be the medium-sized blog network that doesn’t have a lot of costs it can cut and not enough revenue to bank against the economic downturn.

Those networks “will truly struggle (and most will either close or sell to larger networks like us),” Wright said. In July

The Death of Niche Blogging?November 13

For years, bloggers have been indoctrinated into the concept of niche blogging. The idea was to focus on a small segment (people who love to watch cute kittens, for instance) and watch advertisers beat down your door to sell to a narrowly-defined market.

But something happened on the way to deposit those advertising riches — a recession.

Out with the niche and in with the mass market.

“To be successful in publishing, you need economies of scale, and that means big websites with a mass audience rather than niche blogs which need to be sold separately by expensive sales teams,” Portfolio’s Felix Salmon wrote Thursday.

The goal now is to acquire television-like audiences - quality be damned. Forget the nuanced subtleties of a finely-crafted commentary - you need boatloads of posts that will attract the widest audience possible.

Nick Denton’s Gawker Media is just the latest example. Wednesday, the snarky Valleywag was folded into Gawker as part of Denton’s theory of consolidation as the recipe for riding out the financial crisis.

Gawker Media’s Robischon Joins Fast CompanyNovember 13

Add managing editor to Nick Denton’s duties at his Gawker Media empire. Already founder and CEO, Denton will now assume the duties of Noah Robischon, who fled to Fast Company’s new online division, “Fast Company Media.”

Why is Robischon departing? Along with overseeing Gawker’s 11 blogs, Denton credits the M.E. for tripling traffic to tech sites Gizmodo and Kotaku. However, even more burdensome may have been his role as head executioner for Gawker.

“Obviously, the group managing editor job has sucked more recently-Noah’s been the one that’s had to deliver bad news and do much of the planning for cost cuts as the downturn has worsened,” Denton wrote in a memo obtained by MediaMemo.

Although Denton plans to assume Robischon’s duties, he may get help from Gawker Media assistant managing editor and former Gizmodo editor, Brian Lam, according to Silicon Alley Insider.

In a related development, Gawker’s Consumerist site has put itself up for sale.

“Economic times being what they are, Gawker must refocus its efforts on its most commercially successful blogs,” writes Ben Popken. A couple ironies in this situation: the consumer-orie