From the Gawker network, the ever updated source on information on new media has raised the alarm on the adoption of new media by traditional print publishers. This has become the norm of today’s economically challenged firms, go to the net but many questions have been raised about such a move since the net was born and began to spread its global reach. This would not only be wise, but would allow these traditional print media to maintain their diverse talent pool while they try to find a way of salvaging their other businesses in print. read on

From the Blog herald: The recent issue that involved John Stewart on his unwarranted rap on social media or the new internet is a bit unwarranted for as the post in the Blog Herald says (by : Chris Garett), there are a lot of truths but also misconceptions about the whole social thingy. First, for example blogging, it started out as a medium on the internet where anybody who wanted to write about anything (mostly their pitiful lives and their utter uselessness roles in society), much like newspapers of days past which started out as mere advert pages that were finally congealed into a more compressed form that included advertising as well as some useful stuff to gain the interest of the reader. Get hold of any newspaper (if you can still find one) and what do you see? Headlines, articles, commentary and advertisements, wait a minute, ads. We’re getting warmer! Don’t tell me you haven’t earned a buck from social media(your bosses companies sure have!)
read on

Major blogosphere player b5media is set to redesign the overall look of its network sometime next year. According to The Blog Herald, b5media will use one of the Revolution themes as the base theme across its roster of sites.

BH’s Thord Hedengren chips in his thoughts:

While I have nothing against the Revolution Streamline theme, which will be the basis of the new design, I’m a bit surprised to see b5media going with something that is a premium theme available for all. Or is it? I can’t seem to find it on the Revolution Two website, so maybe b5media bought the rights to it? I’ve contacted Brian and Jeremy for a comment on this.

Read the discussion here.

The Blog Herald’s Thord Daniel Hedengren invited three heavy hitters in the blog network industry for our sister site’s first roundtable discussion. Those invited were:

• Jeremy Wright, CEO of b5media
• Collis Ta’eed, CEO of Envato
• Mike Rundle, triad member of 9rules

The discussion revolves around the health of the blog network business model, the current financial situation, and today’s ideal blog network setup, among others.

Read the full discussion here.

We received an anonymous tip last October 1 from a person claiming to be a “b5 Blogger.” Here’s the message he left on our Contact page:

b5 media is cutting our pay by at least half. They said it’s because our stats were wrong for the past three years and now they’re going to be right. The thing is the pay is lowering for most of us by 50% or more. A significant decrease. No one will talk about our base pay so we don’t know if that’s going down too but we’re going to be paid a lot less money now.

Everyones afraid to talk about it because they don’t want to be sued but one member of the team and a channel editor already left because of this and so did some bloggers.

Feel free to use this news but please don’t ask my name. I need my paltry pay until I find a new job. I don’t think I’ll sign the new contract.

We welcome any reactions and clarifications, especially from the network involved, b5 Media.

Easton Ellsworth of our sister site, The Blog Herald has written a brief yet excellent article on the struggles of major blog networks in today’s weak economy. An excerpt:

Consider the b5media network, which boasts hundreds of blogs covering dozens of niche topics.

I spoke with b5media president and CEO Jeremy Wright about the company’s current challenges and how it is responding to the changing economic landscape.

One major challenge is paying bloggers fairly while keeping operating costs as low as possible. “Our biggest priority is to take care of our bloggers, but we also have to be a business and sometimes those two things collide,” says Wright.

Read the full article here.

Syntagma Media’s John Evans has published an article on the recent hardships endured by blog networks, which are tied to the economic downturn.

So what has the title of our post got to do with that? Well, that’s Evans’ answer to a timely question: What to do if you’ve invested heavily in an internet business, such as a blog network?

Evans writes:

Providing content on your own platform as both writer and publisher makes sense because it cuts costs. Hiring other writers to do it for you made sense three years ago, but with advertisers shunning small-to-medium operations it’s probably easier to flip burgers.

Now we need a second bounce to reflate the whole business of working successfully online.

Read the full post at Syntagma.

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.

That’s the question being asked by James Mowery on our sister site, Performancing.com. James says:

Many of these sites state that “you will be paid for your content” and similar. However, there are catches: for one, there is no guarantee they will actually feature your work, and I’ve seen sites that claim the rights to your content even if they don’t feature it (they essentially get your content for free without pay); next, these sites usually determine how much you will be paid on an article by article basis, and this just doesn’t seem right as the writer should set the rate; finally, many of these sites don’t have a chance of making it to the big time and won’t promote your brand in the process.

The article is a must-read for any blogger or writer about to get his/her feet wet with blog networks. James goes on to offer some tips, too.

Read or react to his post here.