A new partnership is set to shake the blogosphere. At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, independent web publishing giant WordPress announced that they will be teaming up with Federated Media Publishing to allow bloggers to profit from their posts through adverting as of the first quarter of 2012.
According to Time’s Techland, Federated will be able to harness the reach of WordPress’s 63 million blogs by offering users an opt-in advertising service. It is Federated’s first move in their plan to serve long tail advertising across open source blogging platforms, according to CEO Deanna Brown, reported Adweek
The influence of WordPress’s web presence is made clear through their numbers. According to recent WordPress stats, the blogging tool powers 14.7% of the of the top million websites in the world. Over 308 million people view more than 2.5 billion pages each month.
How it works is simple. Federated pays WordPress for the business. Bloggers decide to either opt in or opt out of Federeated’s monetization tools. WordPress and Federated then profit by taking a portion of the ad revenues received by the blogger.
This is set to bring a whole new dimension to the blogosphere. The question is: will bloggers buy into it? There is already an underlying tension between the ‘sell-outs’ – those who profit off their blogs and those who blog simply out of devotion to their interests and community of followers.
Blogging began as medium that was centered on sharing and bringing together communities of interest. Will monetizing this platform taint the founding principle of sharing for sharing’s sake? Or will it be a welcome incentive, encouraging even more people to start blogs and share their interests and expertise with the world?
Either way, the deal is set to change the face of blogging and inevitably redefine the medium. WordPress and Federated have the numbers on their side, but the question remains whether bloggers are wanting to profit in the first place and how this will be received by readers and the blogosphere at large.
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