Good news for bloggers?

As the US online ad market is taking a nose dive, the same does not, apparently, apply all across the board. Here is an article from the Gatewatching blog which claims that the Australian online ad market is expected to grow substantially.

It’s pretty boring when bloggers boast and obsess about their traffic, but for those who wish to monetise their work, it might be worth having a chat to the ad agencies who can connect bloggers with this spend. Again, it’s an indication that we’re getting closer to the point where independent “content-makers” may be able to viably make at least part of their living from ad revenue.

In not really related news, yesterday I claimed the most interesting post on the social news sites yesterday came from Politico. I still think it’s interesting, but how could I miss the top post on Digg, about Sarah Palin’s hacked-into mailbox?! Read the details on Gawker.

The headlines – 10. Sept

Sarah Palin’s alleged misuse of her gubernatorial “per diem” allowance (“intended to cover meals and incidental expenses while traveling on state business,” as I learned from the Washington Post’s article) has been one of the hot topics across the board – but it’s missing from the front page of Digg. The numbers might explain why.

The numbers of readers, that is; Digg is much more popular than any of the other 3 surveyed social news sites, as the number of votes testify. (Just to make it clear: each individual user can cast a single vote on any number of articles; but web traffic figures suggest that the number of readers (passive readers) is considerably higher than the number of voters.)

…which of course means that, naturally, it takes more votes, and consequently more time to get on the front page of Digg. Sure enough, the Post’s article is at the time of writing this in the “Upcoming” section at Digg, and I’m pretty sure it will eventually end up on the front page.

Again, this is a small reminder – at least to myself – that size does, in more than one way, matter when it comes to social news sites. One of the starting hypotheses of my research was that there is an ideal size for such sites; they should attract a large enough audience to provide a wide pool of opinions and news sources, yet small enough to keep conversation possible and the site quick and reflexive and actual. But these two conditions are in inherent conflict (at least to some extent), which suggests that social news sites have to assume a different role to that of the supplier of breaking news.

Anyhow, here are the latest headlines.

The headlines – 2. Sept. 2008

On the first day of the official campaign, Sarah Palin attracted most of the attention of social news site readers – but I really don’t think she would mind to draw less attention of this type in the future. Here are the politics-related headlines, from the 4 social news sites I’m analyzing, that proved most popular among readers this past day.