The Power of Blogging and Where It’s Headed

In the early days of Internet marketing, companies scoffed at the potential of the so-called world wide web. They cast the concept of bloggers even further into the shadows, thinking that they weren’t relevant to their customers. My, how times have changed! These days, blogs are not only mainstream, but they have become even bigger than their traditional media counterparts!

More and more people are turning to TMZ and Perez Hilton for their celebrity gossip. Tech enthusiasts point their browsers at Engadget and Gizmodo instead of waiting for a magazine to hit the racks. After all, that magazine will be reporting on news that is already a month old by the time it hits stores. Blogs, on the other hand, are quite literally on the pulse of the industry, quite literally being up to the minute with their relevance.

The major blogs have very much become massive communities on their own and they are no longer in the shadows of traditional outlets like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Blogs are big business and are worth millions of dollars, getting thousands, even millions of visitors on a very regular basis. Even celebrities are recognizing the importance of blogging, keeping their names at the top of the public’s mind at all times. People want to know and they want to know right now.

Blogging is a very powerful tool and popular blogs are being sold for millions of dollars. What started out as independent ventures have quickly become parts of major media empires. Take a look at Gawker Media, for example, a conglomerate that runs such popular blogs as Kotaku, Lifehacker, and Jalopnik. These sites are huge with monumental followings. This is powerful for branding and powerful for audiences.

Moving forward, personal blogs will surely still exist, but professional blogs are very much not only the future, but they’re already the present. Blogs are big business. This cannot be re-iterated enough. With multiple updates each day and loyal fan followings, blogs represent huge opportunities for advertising revenue. And for the businesses who choose to launch their own corporate blogs, even if no advertising is involved at all, the blogs represent a very powerful marketing and branding tool.

Blogs may have once existed on the fringe of the Internet, only read and used by those “in the know,” but blogs today carry huge mainstream appeal. Better still, there is still so much more potential yet untapped. Going back to Gawker Media, for example, they’re recognizing the importance of multimedia and its prominent role in blogging in the future. The sites are almost becoming like TV channels that are completely on demand. Users can choose exactly the programming they’d like, interacting with the authors and building that community even further.

Gawker competitor Weblogs, Inc. runs such sites as The Unofficial Apple Weblog, Download Squad, Joystiq, and TV Squad. It is a subsidiary of AOL, a company that may have otherwise fallen into Internet obscurity in recent years if it were not for this blog network of about 90 blogs. The key to success on the Internet is staying up with the times and AOL recognized the opportunity when it came to professional blogs. These make money and they have increasingly large audiences.