Loading ...The “New Media” Follows The “Old Media” In Taking That “Trickle Down Economical” Hit All The Other Industries Are Suffering From…
[EDITOR'S WARNING: THIS IS ACTUALLY A RARE, SERIOUS COLUMN WITH LITTLE IF ANY SATIRE OR HUMOR INVOLVED...]
For the last couple of years, it has been fun for we bloggers to gloat everytime another mainstream media firm downsized or even went bankrupt, this blogger included. With our trickle down poverty economy in full bloom along with a couple of ill-advised “bailouts”, “stimulus packages”, or whatever you wish to call it whenever our elected public servants wealthy Oligarchs in Washington D.C. bail their rich buddies out of trouble so they can keep on trickling those riches right into yours and my pockets, It was only a matter of time before the Blogospheres would follow the same trail to poverty prosperity our MSM brothers and sisters had forged before us.
Gloating about the fall of Pajamas Media (“PJM” or “PM” from here on out) is ill-advised as far as I’m concerned. Far right? Of course, but unlike their MSM brethren from oh, say, Fox News (just an example), they never pretended to be “Fair And Balanced”; they were the “town criers” our Founders gave up the ghost in order to reaffirm their rights to speak freely against tyranny and misdeeds being perpetrated against the People by our government officials. Many mistakenly assume these guys died and/or endured their extreme hardships to protect the “Rupert Murdochs” of today and the multi-national MSM conglomerates. Here’s the REAL answer to that one — BZZZZT!!! We political bloggers, despite the absense of the technologies we have available today, were THE “Press” our Founding Fathers had in mind. Don’t let anybody kid you on that one.
Who’s next? The Huffington Post on the left side of the aisle? Of course, I don’t believe for one second there is any doubt the right-wing pundits would be gloating themselves and grinning from ear-to-ear were HuffPo to have been the first large gathering place for biased (left in HuffPo’s case) blogging to go down. Admit it, righty bloggers — you KNOW it’s true. Well, guess what, fellow political bloggers — this is NOTHING to gloat about. The beauty of blogging and what it stands for — the refreshing return of The Press of our Founders is in great peril and the trend is not about to turn around anytime soon; that is, unless you are one of those dedicated right-winger bloggers who believes if you simply tighten up and hold steady for a few months, Reaganomics will save you from having to get a “real job”.
Well, guess what? I’ve NEVER dropped the “real job” — I’ve been an Operations Manager for a Fortune 500 company ever since I got back from my involuntary one-year activation as a reservist in direct support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. What really surpises me by the PJM crash is when I’ve learned from reading some of the many troubled reactions of some of those directly affected financially, is that even I have been more fortunate to bring income revenues in through The Gun Toting Liberal™ than some of my blogger brethren on that so-called “A-List” of bloggers than many of them are beginning to admit in the wake. In other words, not so much moolah after all.
What’s funny about all this; if there IS something funny and worthy of a little bit of THOUGHT, is the fact that advertisers and potential advertisers for blogs rely upon some pretty misleading data when they select whom they shall be spending their advertising revenue with. For example, they just LOVE to know what somebody’s Technorati Rating is as if that is a true indicator of how much traffic and respectability a blog such as this one receives. Well, OUR Technorati authority ranking is just a MERE “125″, meaning there are (supposedly) just 125 other bloggers out there who’ve linked to this blog in the last six months. How about — “bad way to make a bidness decision“? This site has over 150,000 inbound links from other WEBSITES (who gives a rip about blogs?) linking in — and that’s just Yahoo alone. Add tens of thousands of other inbounds from Google, Ask.Com, Excite, and the rest of them. Are you THINKING yet?
Another one they love is the Alexa rating — we’re currently weighing in on their “system” somewhere around “website number 500,000 in the world” according to them in both terms of traffic and inbound links. My question is, if that’s true, then why do so many sites and blogs ranked in the Alexa top 100,000 have lower Google PageRanks than this site? And why do so many Fortune 500 sites have a lower PageRank than this site does? Another point — just how many of these so-called “A-Listers” REALLY get the 10,000,000 hits per month THIS site gets? I’d be surprised SHOCKED if I could count them all on all of my fingers and toes. But hey — I’m one of those lowly “B[PLUS] Bloggers” due STRICTLY to the fact I refuse to mislead a potential advertiser by playing “code games” with my CSS, unlike many others in our Blogospheres with a tad bit less integrity than I. See what’s wrong with the formulae here?
The main point is the FACT that we in the Blogospheres are 100% responsible for our own advertising failures. It is WE who attempt to manipulate the potential blog advertiser by pimping our PageRanks, our Technorati (so-called) “authority”, our Alexa Ranking, etc., etc., etc., and try and convince them these are “proof” of the success their campaigns will have? When I say “We”, I’m proud to distance myself from that particular group. I call it “integrity”. The REAL value of a blog’s Technorati “authority” ranking is ZILCH to an advertiser. Same goes for Alexa. Same goes for Google PageRank. Same goes for all of the other so-called “value indicators” a blog can offer to a potential advertiser. If I cared enough to makes this endeavor a revenue-generator capable of feeding myself and my family, I know how to do what all of these so-called “A-List” bloggers do — fudge the hell out of the things needing to be fudged to boost those ratings. NOBODY knows how much traffic The GTL™ does unless I, myself, CHOOSE to offer a login to the stats kept by my underlying web host. SiteMeter? PLEASE. Google Analytics? PLEASE. Misleading determiners of a weblog’s advertising value – ALL of them.
So, according to the many reactions from the Blogospheres on the downfall of PJM, I congratulate them for making the “big bucks” blogging for the short time they did. Roger L. Simon, the founder, had been bankrolling the whole thing at a loss (Pajamas Media) for many moons; most likely himself the victim of unscrupulous jerks who had intentionally over-inflated the values of those venues named above and he himself most likely joined the bandwagon in the mistaken belief those venues actually represented the advertising potential and the potential for the advertising dollars to turn a profit based solely upon the so-called “ratings” by those venues. As if a blog who is favored by even 6000 other bloggers in the Technorati network of blogs means jack-**** to a product manufacturer or a service offerer as far as incoming revenues goes? I’m sorry; and perhaps this makes me a hypocrite; but when I visit a blog I like, I try to click on their advertizing banners but I’ve never bought a thing after that. Bloggers are NOT a great source of income, friends. Winning, or leading a popularity contest at Technorati doesn’t mean your advertisers will make a red cent from their mislead investment, folks. That’s the bottom line.
As for MOI (and again, for the benefit of new readers — I AM part French and unapologetic for it), I’m more than happy to make a couple of hundred bucks a month on this site (in those inconsistent GOOD months) despite what its probable “Internets Real Estate Value” value really is based upon the ACTUAL readership and ACTUAL Internets authority and ACTUAL traffic it receives. While my heart goes out to those bloggers from PJM who are sadly, out of a job next month, I’m just glad I never did give up the “day gig” and most VERY thankful for those readers who occasionally make a purchase from The Official GTL™ online store, make an occasional donation to promote drunken blogging and to those brave advertisers who choose to DIRECTLY promote their products and/or services at this controversial site, I say — God Bless you all and thanks from the bottom of my heart. Believe me, I’m not getting “rich” by blogging but then again, I’m here to blog because I’m truly trying to entertain and/or help our Founders in their original quest to protect and promote we “Town Criers” known as the REAL “Press”. Oh, and it’s “good therapy” according to my combat-related Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (“PTSD”) therapists at the VA, too.
Last but not least before I climb off my soapbox — while there’s nothing particularly “funny” about ANYBODY losing their dream and/or dream job, my sincerest hope is that this will serve as a “wakeup call” to my fellow bloggers who tend to buy into and/or attempt to SELL the ILLUSION an Alexa, Google, Technorati, or any other flawed ranking system actually MEANS anything will trickle into a struggling entrepeneur’s pockets will stop spouting this flawed (at best) B.S. and get back to what’s REAL — traffic. Expose your TRAFFIC. Expose your page views. Expose your page views per visit. Expose your unique visitors and work directly with your advertisers to help them succeed and perhaps you’ll be able to eke out a simple living for yourselves one day again in the not-so-distant future. We (meaning “you“) have helped contribute to our (meaning “your“) own demise by bamboozling potential advertisers into believing “popularity ratings amongst fellow bloggers” means a damned THING in regards to the success of their campaigns.
Wait — one more thing before I leave this one to our commentators and fellow bloggers — unscrupulous bloggers and ad brokers are not the ONLY ones who deserve this fall of advertising revenues either. Blame Technorati, Google, Alexa, and the other so-called “ranking authorites” who have intentionally gone out of their collective “way” to overinflate their own importance in determining advertising success based upon their FLAWED and easily manipulated algorythms, too. Once again — you want to make an informed decision on whether or not there is potential success for your campaign at this site? Easy — ask for some stats from our web host and ignore all of the other crappola.
Over and OUT for now.
***
Some of my personal “faves” on this topic: Our good friend Joe Gandelman (another AWESOME blogger roundup over there) who inspired this column by emailing this post from The Moderate Voice directly to my inbox; Ann Althouse (glad she just said “no” to PJM); Dan Collins of Protein Wisdom (one of the PJM casualties); John Cole of Balloon Juice (another of the PJM casualties but one of the few PJ “lefties” and by far my fave over there) has no regrets; Rick Moran of Right Wing Nut House (yet another of the PJ casualties) says “just get over it“; Dan Riehl of Riehl Word View puts it about right — “… this is my hobby… “; Allah Pundit of Hot Air — “… Thank god I have that pothole-filling job in the new Obama WPA to fall back on. …”; Ace of Ace Of Spades HQ says “… Damn. I was finally starting to make an amount of money I wasn’t utterly embarrassed by, too. …”
I hate to see PM go down even though I didn’t read it. I understand it was one of the better right wing blogs.
Since I’m not a blogger (just a reader) I didn’t realize there were so many gimmicks to getting advertisers.
I do know that this last year that I got much better political news from the various blogs that I read than I did from my newspapers and definitly better news than from TV or radio. This is what I like about blogs, that you can get as many different view points that you have the strength to pursue.
So no, I won’t gloat over PM: I feel quite bad about it.
Pajamas Media goes the way of the 8-Track | Political Byline // Jan 31, 2009 at 10:54 PM
[...] The Gun Toting Liberal offers up a very well written piece on this [...]
Great post and a fun read.
I’m just hoping you’re not normalizing the left and right as to an apples to apples comparison.
It’s apples to oranges IMHO.
The goal of the right wing is to have an America that is authoritarian and America that is run a theocratic corpocracy with massive defense spending.
The right-wing also serves to enrich the wealthy and multinational corporations.
Don’t forget the right’s exclusive claim to God and Country, and the right-wing’s ease at starting massively expensive warfare preemptively.
Not sorry at all, I could care less how the right-wing goes under… the sooner the better.
I disagree; the demise of Pajamas is excellent news. They have been little more than repeaters of Bush propaganda for their entire existence, and as such are fiction writers. Some fiction writers, like Stephen King, can turn a buck doing it. But poorly written fiction deserves to fail.
And besides, any organization that hires that wife-beating scofflaw Joe the Dumber as a “reporter” deserves no respect from me, and they’ll get none.
I have to agree with Gunny, you can’t use any of the blog tracking data sources to judge the success of any blog. The only value you can put to a blog is the long time readers that continue to return and participate in the the many discussion offered by the writers.
I’ve used all kinds of stat counters, and page hit counters and ranking tools and not one of them agrees with the results the others are tabulating. All those tools are fun to play with but its like trying to store a gallon of water in a sive. To much is going to leak out for it to be worth anything.
Great content equals returning visitor that are curious and asking themselves “I wonder what GTL wrote about today” Click!
Rock on Bro and damn good post as always!
So true, Mat — none of those counters or “blog ranking” systems are even remotely indicative of the real value of a site to an advertiser. The most ludicrous ones are the most used so-called “indicators”, too — Technorati and Alexa, who mainly use popularity with other bloggers to “sell” advertisers on the value of one’s site as if the bloggers are the ones who will be purchasing the products and/or services? How about NOT. It is our readers and non-blogger visitors who’ll be paying the bills…
OOPS — let me amend that last post — ANY blogger who wishes to purchase our apparel, hit the tip jar, or support our sponsors is more than welcome to and in fact, I highly encourage it! Heh…
“Roger L. Simon, the founder, had been bankrolling the whole thing at a loss (Pajamas Media) for many moons;”
Not true. Not true at all. Not one penny true. Funds come from, or came from, Aubrey Chernik.