You’re about to start a new blog (or you want to expand an existing blog), and you come across blogging networks such as b5media or On Topic Media (Orble). How these networks seem to work is you sacrifice a percentage of ad revenue in exchange for being part of the blogging network. Depending on the model adopted by the blogging network, you may or may not own the blog, and you may or may not receive some kind of subsidy to help establish your blog.

So what competitive advantage do you gain by joining a blogging network?

The barriers to entry of starting a blog are very low; ludicrously low, I think.

To get some perspective, let’s look at print magazines, which I think were the old-world equivalent of the blogosphere.

Some years ago I started what became a successful computer magazine, FREE ACCESS. It cost $30,000 to print the first issue, and there was a huge opportunity cost in terms of unpaid wages because my business partner and I had to quick our day jobs to create write and layout the magazine, and sell advertising.

Compare that with blogging. Blogging platforms, like WordPress, are completely free – and if you’ve never tried Wordpress, you’ll be impressed by just how powerful it is, especially when used with plug ins. As far as investment of time to get a blog started, I think it would be fair to say that as long as you know your area, you can get away with spending about an hour a day to get your blog started. As far as selling advertising, you can use Google Ad Sense to sell your advertising until you get to a critical mass where it makes sense for you to start exploring other opportunities.

So to distil the key issues raised so far:

• There is unlikely to be much a technological advantage gained by joining a blogging network – the technology is free, and most of the problems you’ll face have already been solved by other, so you’ll find free solutions on the Interney.
• Is there a selling advantage? Ie will you be better sell advertising by joining a blogging network? Google Adsense is incredibly efficient, and because it dominates the market, it’s much more likely to be able to deliver advertising that matches your site. Most blog networks use Google Adsense anyway, so if anything, you’re just adding a middle man to the process who is taking a cut? On the other hand, a blogging network will know how to optimize advertising so that it better works on your blog – but this is something you can learn by trial and error, or you can simply buy one of the many Adsense books on the market.
• One of the big problems with there being such low barriers to entry is that there is a lot of competition (though not all of it is real competition, which I’ll talk about in a future blog). This means is that differentiation (another future blog topic) and the product develop process are really important (another future topic) – but you don’t need to join a blogging network to get these right.

I think the real competitive advantage offered by a blogging network is a marketing advantage. After all, one of the big challenges of publishing a blog is for it to be noticed. So the question to ask yourself is will the marketing benefit outweigh the cost of a reduced advertising margin? I think this needs careful evaluation, and I’d be really interested in your opinions — I want to explore this in more detail in future blogs.

There are other issues as well, such as, who owns the blog, but let’s leave that for another time as well.

I seemed to have raised more questions than answers in this blog, but hopefully that will give you plenty to comment on and give me plenty to write about.