Chris Garrett has an interesting article over at our sister site, The Blog Herald. There he discusses the high overhead for blog networks, then segues into every blogger’s choice: whether to go at it alone or join a network.

Chris says:

Most beginning bloggers miss out a big chunk of their balance sheet. They mark their own time down as free, which you realize after you have been running any business for a while is a joke, your time is a very precious commodity indeed!

When you work with a network your role is quite clear. Writing, interacting and possibly promotion. Technical and design stuff “just happens”, advertisers are (hopefully) delivered on your behalf and traffic is boosted through the network effect and interlinking.

Read the post here.

Last month, we reported on the Gawker Media Network’s lowering of its writers’ pay rates. Their new system pays writers based on the number of page views their posts generate.

Well, it appears that this new system is working for the network, based on the results of a research conducted by Bloggasm’s Simon Owens.

According to Simon (no pun intended!):

So now that six months have passed, has the new system resulted in increased traffic? To find this out I analyzed Site Meter statistics for 11 Gawker Media blogs (I didn’t include Io9 since it only recently launched). Overall, traffic for all Gawker blogs combined saw a 40% increase in page views. Each individual blog experienced an average increase of 49%.

Read the full results for each Gawker blog here. Great job, Simon.

Blog network Splashpress Media (owner of Blog Network Watch) has recently launched Performancing Ads, billed as the “ultimate advertising solution for both blog publishers and advertisers.”

As announced on the Performancing blog, the platform is “becoming the largest (and most diverse) network of publishers for the 125×125 ad format.”

Learn more about Performancing Ads here, or visit its main site.