How many of the right readers can you offer us, dear?
April 23, 2008
"So, just how many DINKY unique visitors with a penchant for expensive jewlery do we get by employing you to blog for us?"
If this post on how "Personality pays in the pay-per-click economy of blogging" is anything to go by, this sort of sentiment may come to govern many a future job-interview in the media world.
As Philip pointed out in the comments, the post I wrote on the blogger who promised to bring in 120,000 readers for her future employer left a lot to be explored. It was just a tidbit I jotted down really, short on time and all of that. But I finally found time to make a few phone calls, which resulted in this piece. However, it doesn't answer all the questions Philip raised, so here's a bit more context:
When Swedish blogger Katrin Schulman recently made it known she was keen to move her delicately named blog, Fuck you right back, away from lifestyle site Stureplan.se, her blog was snapped up by competing site Sthlmsfinest.com, which hopes to gain a substantial traffic increase on the back of the deal.
The interesting story here, to me at least, is how both these sites hire high-profile bloggers to bring in specific audiences which are attractive to advertisers (both are funded by advertisement).
Alexander Erwik, editor-in-chief of the latter site told me they pay a mix of bloggers to write high-profile blogs about music, fashion and trends – all of which bring in their own niche audiences.
Likewise, Thomas Grabe, the managing editor at competing Stureplan.se, said: "The mix of bloggers is very important to the site. To showcase a blogger or personality you can not have more than max eight blogs. There are perhaps 15 really big bloggers who get paid for blogging in Sweden, six of them originally blogged for us."
Grabe explained that it was Alex Schulman, Karin's husband, who made Stureplan the success it is, and that at one point several of the members of the Schulman family, an influential Swedish family, were writing high-profile blogs – the brother, the mother, the wife and Alex Schulman himself.
"It was a bit like Big Brother, but online. Katrin is very controversial and told people like it was, hence the name of the blog: fuck you right back. The F-word is indeed controversial, but not to the extent of which it is abroad," said Grabe.
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