Blog
By setting up their own brands, blog sites can derive a number of online investment opportunities, including on-line reviews, paper magazines, research reports, seminars, subscriber offerings for professional inquiries, and the development of early markets for innovative new products.
China's Baidu IPO was a big success in August 2005, an important predictor of the astonishing strength of China's internet-related markets. In this exciting, high-speed development of the network economy, the forefront of the site is the blog.
In 2005, the number of Internet users in China was 115 million, the second largest in the world, after the United States, according to data from Cnnic, iresearch and other surveys. As of 2007, the figure will grow to about 190 million, forecast to be more than 210 million users by 2008, China will become the world's largest network application market, when the Chinese local blog market will also mature. June 2005, China's online contributors have nearly accounted for 8% of the world, ranked first.
Where is the market opportunity
Blogging sites are vying for audiences with traditional media (magazines, newspapers, radio and television), but the timeliness of the information provided by the blogs is a competitive advantage over the traditional media's need for subscriptions.
According to a report of the Financial Times of April 15, 2005, News Corp, one of the world's largest news agencies, has warned their newspaper editors that "a new generation of media has been created and grown in the network, and that existing media organizations must radically reinvent themselves to meet the challenges and risks of decline and eventual demise." According to Pew Research, the internet is a "new normal" for disseminating news and information.
According to a nonprofit organization sponsored by the Pew Charitable Foundation,--pew International and American Life Engineering's social impact on the network, 2004, the readership of the blog site increased by 58%, 2005, the number continues to grow every 5.8 seconds will produce a new blog. More research has shown that 44% of adult Internet users are involved in online discussions. Operators must quickly plan for the blogging market: Blogging sites offer two ways of communicating, where audiences can express their views directly or indirectly about business.
In 2004, venture capital invested 33 million dollars in blogging-related businesses, a significant increase from 8 million dollars in 2003.
How to commercialize a blog site
The advantage of the blog site is its geometric growth of the audience, and the information of the reported value of real-time, rapid dissemination, these messages may become a region, a country or even the world's events. The blog site allows for interactive, dynamic interaction between enthusiastic participants, who are fixed readers of a particular type of professional information that targets specific things and organizations. Site positioning is a professional elite community, its audience and bloggers have a common interest and hobby, in this community, readers can communicate with the author's systematic ideas and ideas, in other places, the market staff is difficult to find such a professional target group.
For the above reasons, the blog site should be a special concern of the enterprise target. A mature product on the market will cost millions of dollars, as well as a few months of market development time. In the analysis of audience errors and mistakes, will seriously affect the competitive advantage. However, through the blog site, you can have an early launch of the target market, to provide a deep understanding of the product competitiveness of real-time analysis, in the full launch before there is time to correct the shortcomings, and optimize the treatment. In addition, the blog site can also be used to develop a large, upfront market for new products, and to provide advice to try to reduce the mature market acceptance time for this new product. A blog site is an ideal way to test consumers ' reactions to new ideas and products.
One example of the business model of a blog site is the well-known Slashdot website that is running. According to Igen's CEO Craig Atkinson's study of the model, "Slashdot Web site is part of a resource-sharing network." Their commercial model is basically online advertising. They put ads between articles and comments that spread throughout the site. They also use subscriptions, in which case the ad is dropped and only articles are sent to subscribers first. By studying the market, they will also make some transactions with the networks and companies in the site to increase the strategic revenue. Their costs are small, because they only need a small number of people to edit and maintain the site. ”
Because of the attractiveness of blog sites, many new companies in related fields have emerged. For example, the blogads.com company, which specializes in matching advertisers with its content (business, technology, fashion, politics). The blog site has potential for advertising revenue and advertising effects, an example of which is that in just a few months, Weblogs Inc. has been able to get hundreds of thousands of of dollars in advertising revenue, while Sony and Audi have successfully hosted a blog competition for blog clients.
Gawker Media has launched several blog sites, including Gawker.com and gizmodo.com. Nike is paying Gawker to influence its professional bloggers because those bloggers are opinion leaders who influence the market by commenting on new products. The branch of this blog business model includes innovative, professional brand blog sites micro-sites, which appear to be in the blogosphere, rather than others, as a form of capitalization. The universalization of blogs and the acceptance of consumers of this new revolutionary form give a personalized voice to the product's propaganda.
By setting up their own brands, blog sites can derive a number of online investment opportunities, including on-line reviews, paper magazines, research reports, seminars, subscriber offerings for professional inquiries, and the development of early markets for innovative new products. Weblogs and Lockergnome have provided a good precedent in this area. By means of instant messages, RSS, PDAS, SMS, and blogs to alert technical emails, blog sites are promoted to audiences to gain revenue.
No other communication media like the blog site has such a fixed audience, even if the e-mail is not, the perfect way of communication, but now it seems a bit too slow. Silkroad is a company that specializes in blogging software, including Forbes magazine, which has been reporting on efficiency gains, such as how to recycle products.