Consolidation Doesn’t Equal Big Advertising Deals

Over the past year and a half, I’ve taken notice of a trend where blogs are being snatched up by blog networks left and right, leading to blog consolidation/networks. The common sense idea behind a blog network is that you can bring in more ad revenue if you combine a number of mediocre blogs and use their collective traffic to score bigger advertising deals. Pretty simple idea right? According to David Peralty who has first hand experience in this realm of blogging (He is co-founder of the Grand Effect blog network) blog consolidation isn’t all that it is cracked up to be.

I assumed because there would be a great deal of higher quality, focused blogs that we could get some high advertising rates, and when you bring our traffic together, we have a fair bit of page views, but still the advertisers aren’t running to our doors. I’ve shopped around the network a bit to some companies trying to gauge their response, and so far it has been a really lukewarm response.

David’s post resonates with the business of blogging because it goes against common sense. Blog network = Multiple Blogs under one brand = Higher statistics you can take to the advertiser = More revenue. But David’s example tells a different story.

So why is that? If you run a blog network, do you need to hit a sweet spot? Are blog networks that are the size of B5Media the only ones who can net sweet advertising deals? What ingredients are needed to create a successful, high profit blog network?