Someone HAS to be doing this, but I can’t find it. 

I’ve been thinking about some things I heard at the ConvergeSouth convention a couple weeks back. (It really opened my eyes on a lot of things net-related.) The Keynote was by Brent D Payne, the SEO director for Tribune. In it, he talked about how Google’s AdSense was very tough to make work. This wasn’t news, but he later talked about how blogs could try and raise their profile.

At a later session, one of the speakers discussed ad revenue and talked about the need for bloggers/writers/reporters to be “entrepreneurial” and be their own sales staff. I like the concept, but the fact is a lot of reporters don’t have the time or skill set to do that. I know I don’t.

So why isn’t there an ad agency out there doing this from the top down? Blogs don’t have a ton of reach, but they have a lot in aggregate. If, say, Nike had a new shoe and they wanted to get it out to people who might buy it, they could do some broad ad on the big sites like ESPN and SI, no question, but could they get a bigger “bang for their buck” by splitting that big ad spend up into small chunks, snapping up hundreds of blogs that could show more engagement and authenticity than just some banner ad?

Fox recently did this with their show “Lone Star.” They sent out DVDs to people with “twitter influence” and asked them to comment. They didn’t go positive or negative with their request, just to mention it. I got it, liked the show enough, but the strategy didn’t seem to work, with the show cancelled after just the second show. Was that a failure of the show or the ad campaign? I’m not sure and hope someone else experiments with this.

An ad on this Tumblr wouldn’t be worth very much, but I think there’s probably a value to sponsoring Joe Sheehan’s newsletter, to putting an ad on Jamey Newberg’s site during the Rangers’ run, or even sponsoring my Twitter feed. If every 50th tweet or so was a quick ad — “Today’s Sunday Morning Updates sponsored by Peet’s Coffee (LINK)” — I think people wouldn’t mind and the advertiser would get their money’s worth. There’s probably hundreds of ways to make this work, though it would take a lot of work. 

The way this is all headed is to the extremes - either the top names gravitate to the big shops, the way Aaron Gleeman and Craig Calcaterra have to NBC, and the hobbyists hold down the low end with volume - or we’ll have to change the model by cutting a lot of small pieces of the pie.

I like pie a lot. I like money better.