Glenn Reynolds’ Instapundit did more than 100,000 page views yesterday.

I’ve spent the last six years selling sites to traditional publishers and have met print publishers with costly sites who (still) don’t manage that traffic in a year. Seriously. Bloggers do not realize just how vigorously their part-time efforts thrash the bang-for-buck achieved by most traditional publishers online.

Instapundit illustrates a perverse law of web traffic. We all know about Metcalfe’s law, which

Of course quality, focus, information-density and presentation are essential. But all else being equal, a site that links religiously will attract orders-of-magnitude more traffic than a site that ignores the rest of the web.

This law upsets traditional publishers, who are born and bred to grab eyeballs and hold ’em. Glenn made nearly 100 links yesterday — some narcissistic publishers haven’t made that many in five years online.

In pushing readers to visit other sites, Instapundit constructs a new network. Some linked sites link back. Many visitors return to see the freshest postings; some e-mail reax and news. Previously linked bloggers check back to examine their new peers.

Enabling a network, Instapundit’s utility far outstrips that of another site that might simply “publish” an unlinked digest of the same information. Instapundit [url=http://sm6.sitemeter.com/default.asp?action=stats&site=s11instapundit&report=36]traffic has grown from 500,000 page views in June to 1 million in August. September seems to be on track for 1.2 million plus.

(9/13/02 In a parallel post yesterday, Jeff Jarvis rightly takes issue with Clay Shirky’s statement that “most weblogs are much more broadcast than intercast”. Jarvis says “what has fascinated me about this world of weblogs is that as a group, they are a community. There is, to use the jargon, ‘intercast’ communications between and among webloggers: I link to and comment on somebody, publicly; they do likewise; others join in; zap: community.” 9/16/02 Like Sassafrass in the comments to this post, Doc notes that while he is Instapundit’s equal in the myelin ecosystem, he has just 10% of the traffic. All links are not created equal. 9/20/02
Rick Bruner points out that he articulated the linking implications of Metcalfe’s law in his 1998 book Net Results. Rick’s 1998 formula needs one more variable: links work far better when made to sites/content capable of linking back. That’s what turns a jumble of blogs into a network and really makes the traffic dynamo hum.)

Greg Beato writes: “Tools like Bloggingnetwork.com, which makes it easier to support independent content, and blogads.com, which actually gives you something in return for supporting independent content, are a valuable addition to the blogosphere. Will they survive? Who knows? But I think it’s great that they’re here, and hope to see an increasing number of similar efforts.” And Neil Dodds writes: Blogads “represent a form of micro-targeting similar to classified ads in a local newspaper or fan ads in a zine. In many cases, but by no means all, audiences will be smaller than those of big media, but this is offset by the ads’ reach and low costs.”

I’m fascinated by “thin media” — news sites staffed by 0.25 to 1.5 writers.

Matt Drudge was the first thin media mogul. He eschewed reporting and sought to distill, popularize, accelerate and aggregate other sites’ stories.

Drudge was expected to ride Clinton’s coattails into obscurity. Instead, he’s stronger than ever and has spawned 100s of other thin media link-peddlers, each finding a progressively tighter niche to itch.

Cougars in South Wales, animal sacrifice rituals, an orange orb, Berkeley weirdos… Weird Files is a fascinating front for Ken Layne’s print syndication business. Gizmodo‘s doing its thing with million-color printers, combadges, camera phones, portable hard drives for photogs and 1cm thick mini-disk players. Romenesko’s MediaNews links a FOIA about FOIAs, Bradlee on Neuharth, and Trudeau on Doonesbury. Rough & Tumble links Orange County crime, Davis signs law against burglary tool, and Santa Cruz officials fume over medical pot club bust. And ScienceBlog touts Dust-sized chips, electronic cars, and synthetic diamond film.

Although all are blogs, each eschews personal anecdote, agenda or banter and sticks to the new.

Style books differ. Rough & Tumble knocks out one to four straight sentences. Gizmodo holds the line at two sentences, with an occasional Economistic twist. ScienceBlog and WeirdFiles introduce adjectives and storytelling. MediaNews adds quotations and reax. Meanwhile, Drudge cooks on with his griddle of hot headlines.

Other great examples: Obscure Store, LAExaminer,Arts & Letters Daily…

Editorializing: Why is it worth writing about thin media at 5.50 AM EST? Because there will be 100s of thousands more of these things in just a couple years. The sooner the model is perfected, the sooner it can MIRV. And (cue commercial) Blogads [url=http://www.blogads.com:8080/BlogadzPreview2/order_html]classifieds will power their cash registers.

(In theory, other layers of thin media should materialize as traditional publishing constructs dematerialize, right? BlogCMS is already well-populated. Sekimori is carving out a design reputation. Nothing Special and Hostmatters have nice hosting practices. Sitemeter and Extreme Tracking keep score. Will ambitious bloggers ever hire elite editors to probe for excellence? Itinerant blog copy editors? What else are we missing?)

Doc Searles writes: “Blogging for me is a way to leverage time in the extreme. For worthwhile-ness per unit of effort (say, per keystroke), blogging kicks ass more than anything else I’ve ever done.” I agree. Blogging is somehow the virtuous twin of spam — cheap, text, mass communication that is (nonetheless) non-obtrusive, personalized, contextualized and pursuasive.

Ray Ozzie looks at the way his Groove groupware is being used. “Approximately 35% of shared spaces are between a single pair of individuals, 60% of shared spaces are between 3 and 25 individuals, and 5% of shared spaces have more than 25 individuals. Amazingly to me – given the design center of the UI – I found that within this 5% there are actually hundreds of spaces with 100-250 members each; I’d surely never have expected this. One other incredibly fascinating tidbit: 25% apparently use shared spaces with only themselves as a member, using Groove as a ‘briefcase’ to transparently and securely synchronize files across multiple computers that they own – e.g. Office documents being synchronized between home and office PCs.” (Fun stuff, but shouldn’t these percentages = 100?)

A BT-funded study of mobile telephone use says that “gossip” accounts for 2/3 of human conversation, and then looks at the mobile phone as a gossip tool. Plenty of observations can be ported to blogs. I’ll quote just a couple here:

Texting [SMS] is particularly important in maintaining contact with a wide social network – allows us to maintain social bonds even when we do not have the time, energy, inclination or budget for calls or visits. Texting re-creates the brief, frequent, spontaneous ‘connections’ with members of our social network that characterised the small communities of pre-industrial times.
…
In the fast-paced and fragmented modern world, social bonding through gossip becomes even more important – but also more difficult. We no longer live in the kind of small, close-knit tribes or communities for which we are ‘designed’ by our evolutionary heritage, where we would naturally be in daily contact with the members of our social network. Our Pleistocene hunter-gatherer brains, hard-wired for constant grooming-talk with a tightly integrated kinship and friendship network, are struggling to cope with the social isolation of modern urban life. Most of us no longer enjoy the cosiness of a gossip over the garden fence. We may not even know our neighbours’ names, and communication is often limited to a brief, slightly embarrassed nod, if that.
Telephones have helped to alleviate some of the stresses caused by fragmented modern lifestyles, but before the advent of mobiles most of us were severely restricted in both the quantity and quality of communication with our social network.

Just as a cellular phone is portable in space, a blog is portable in time — it waits patiently for new users to come along and then imparts our message. (Found in the October issue of The Atlantic.)

Jay Niemann writes: “This Weblog is an experiment in grassroots entrepreneurship. Specifically, it concerns the sale of unusual vinyl records.”

Meanwhile, Ken Layne launches a blog called Weird Files to promote print syndication of his columns about weirdness, specifically UFOs, crop circles and Black Helicopters.

And Ben Sullivan is promoting his Blogads by advising buyers, “If you’re selling something, I’ll keep your ad up until it gets sold, or you tire of all the responses you receive. Something I called Guaranteed Classifieds.”

Congratulations to Bill Quick for selling the first Blogad for $32.

Some folk object to advertising in blogs for ideological reasons, arguing that blogs are meant for a higher, purer calling. Others say bloggers don’t have the requisite audience or commercial acumen.

Phooey.

First, society needs professional blogs. Journalism as we love it is being crushed by the vice grip of price/earnings. Journalism survives under a few old-school publishers, but everywhere else swarms of mediocre local monopolists, bleed-to-lead TV stations and Murdoch duopolies are killing the honorable fourth estate. Autonomous, dedicated, low-overhead bloggers can save
journalism.

Second, logic demands professional blogs. Many print publications — with smaller and less influential readerships than a good blog’s — sell enough advertising to pay 20-person staffs. And every surface from newspapers to matchbooks to taxi doors to movie screens to telephone books to cellphone screens to stadiums has eventually found advertising underwriters. Why not blogs too?

Blogs offer advertisers and sponsors intimate contact with influential, passionate audiences. Blogs disintermediate gutless traditional media and offer greater value for money. Blogs articulate new demographics and new market metrics. (For more context, see my early Blogonomics post.)

The old media economics ‘ he who controls distribution wins the most eyeballs and serves advertisers best ‘ will soon be plowed under by a new economics ‘ she who relates best attracts the most valuable audience.

We hope to help make it happen. Blogads brings to advertising the simplicity, low-cost, power and atomic-level automony that tools like Antville, Blogger, Greymatter, MT, pMachine, and Userland deliver to editorial content.

Blogads work seamlessly in all blogforms. Each blogger can sell ads on her own site, setting her own prices, rhetoric and standards, approving or rejecting submissions. Advertisers can upload images, create mini-sites, invite comments and classify their ads. For readers, Blogads classify ads by affinity and commercial category, reducing search costs and boosting serendipitous contacts.

For buyer, seller and reader, Blogads deliver a new commercial kick in a few clicks.

So bloggers will get rich quick, right? No. Not any time soon. Bill’s sale notwithstanding, the money won’t gush tomorrow or next month or even this year.

It took nearly 200 years to advance from the invention of the movable type printing press to the publication of the first newspaper. Nearly a decade passed after the web was spun before the blogging culture bloomed. And the dream of harnessing advertising to personal publishing has been pursued for many months by people like Matt Haughey, Rusty Foster, Dan Chan, Arnab Nandi, Evan Williams, and Pud.

Technology isn’t the challenge. The tools exist. What does not exist yet is the right words and ideas.

We need to invent a new mentality, carve a new space in the crowded minds of advertisers and consumers, articulate new values.

As with previous new medias, Blogads need new metrics, benchmarks, rhetoric and business logic.

Blogads need people experimenting with advertising content and forms, seducing advertisers, thinking in new directions, discovering weird new businesses that will benefit from the Blogad’s unique simplicity and audience grip.

Blog readers need to see the blog-advertiser not as another PR-geyser, but as an ally, a comrade, somebody who has invested in a mind-set they care about.

I’m not worried. It will happen. Bloggers are the ultimate intellectual entrepreneurs, history’s largest and most powerful class of autonomous scribes. Blog passion, inventiveness and audience-grip guarantee that this medium will detonate a new commercial universe.

Sign on to sell your own Blogads if you have patience. Sign on if you are willing to wait months for paying advertisers and, in the meantime, prime your adstrip with interesting, humorous commerical content — your friend’s gig, your aunt’s e-Bay auction, your son’s scout troop’s spaghetti supper. Put up affiliate links to books you love. Put up free links to charities. Link to great businesses whose ideas you want to boost. Experiment, see what works. Woo advertisers with brilliant tales.

And if you aren’t ready to invent Blogads and prefer to watch, please do click a Blogad and remember that the advertiser supports something you value.

(9/04/02 Matt Welch sold a Blogad on his site before his adstrip was even live. The ad promotes an e-book that costs $3.95 — a great product/price point for Blogads. The advertiser must be a regular reader of Matt’s blog, because he punches reader hot buttons like he’s Casius Clay. Elsewhere, Heath Row notes that since he’s got a fulltime job, his blog will remain a Blogadless labor of love. Still, “Blogads could very well become the tail that wags the blog dog, just like with most media,” he writes.) Rick Bruner thinks hard, declares “By jove, I think it just might work!” and buys an ad. (Look left.) Smart, personality-based marketing for the blogosphere. Thank you Rick!)

The NYTimes profiles Dean Singleton, who runs the “fastest-growing newspaper company of the last two decades,” MediaNews Group. To fund growth, Singleton slashes staffs and once “upheld the firing of a reporter who had failed to file a news story consisting of an advertiser’s news release verbatim, and instead added accurate details that wound up making the advertiser look bad.” Singleton oversees 46 daily newspapers and 81 nondaily newspapers.