The Blogging Business

When talk about blogging, everyone will see it the different way.

Some will see it as complete waste of time, some will see it is a way to be glamour, some people will see it a way to freeload on the benefit of the campaign. Some with more noble intention, is to share their knowledge by documenting what they have learnt in their blog.

However, there are a category of people, who see blogging as a way of living, earning of blogging, while still maintain the flexibility of sharing information.

Just like TV channels or radio stations, they provide you entertainment, information in their news, information via their programs. But at the same time, they are also earning while providing information in the form of advertisement and as contents in their programs.

A lot blogs nowadays are functioning the same as these TV stations or radio stations. These bloggers startup their own blog to share the information, and at the same time, making it as an platform for business.

Such kind of shared contents which also partially serve as advertisement, we call it as advertorial.

There are nothing wrong to publish advertorial in the blog, as long as the blogger do provide honest review on the product they are trying to promote. It is very normal nowadays, as the social media had already replacing the mainstream media in spreading news and promoting products of some companies.

Sometimes these bloggers are engaged by some advertorial agency, some are engaged by other bloggers who doing these as independent agents.

As blogging has become a form of business to some of these bloggers, I believe there should be a baseline of the conduct and guidelines to make sure the healthiness of this new industry.

I’ve seen some of these bloggers who are in the blogging business, trying to sabotage each other with a lot of shameful tactics, such as defame, boycott etc. Some even trying to kill their competitors by screwing up the price in order to snatch the business from other people.

The worst I’ve seen, are those agent lower down the price until nothing can be paid to the bloggers, but just sufficient for the agent’s engagement fees. But somehow it is puzzling me, why there are bloggers who willing to accept the review campaign that have so many demands to them.

Then I finally noticed that most of these bloggers are actually new comers into the blogging business. They never see this new line of advertising business as an business. Instead, they view blogging as a platform for making them glamour, a platform to leech, freeloading while in fact they were not qualified for any invitation for events and reviews at the first place.

Well for start, it is OK to accept some invitation to do it for very low price, as per reflected by your low page view statistic. But as the blog grow, so should your rate card. If you maintain to do things for free, although you already gained high page views, your reputation will also remain low.

Such ill trends in the blogging industry has causing a great price of the whole blogging industry. A lot of very reputable bloggers, had now affected by this sick trends, and people are now labelling all bloggers as “freeloaders”, “bimbo who will advertise for free in return for glamour” etc.

This has to be stop, or else the whole world will see Malaysian bloggers as the most disgrace group of people who utilizing blog to become fame whore and freeloaders.