What’s next?

Two journalists have asked me several questions in common in recent days “aren’t blogs just niche publications that will never get big?” and “what happens to blog advertising after the election is over?”

Since these seem to be in the water, here are my thoughts:

There are 300 million Americans. Consider what Reed’s law means when you apply it to 300 million people. Basically, there are trillions of trillions of combinations of people (aka unserved niches) within that 300 million people.

Those niches are unserved (vis information and intra-niche communications) because traditional media economics — the cost of building a printing press, hiring trucks, chopping down trees, paying for the CEO and her secretary and her nephew in ad sales, paying the shareholders — made it economically impossible.

But now blogging and it’s appendages have lowered the bar radically for creating and serving info markets.

What’s next for blogads? Although some cool advertisers — more than ever in fact — are in the pipeline (like today’s Bill Murray ad!), after the election we’ll undoubtedly see a big drop in political advertising as candidates disappear and political causes catch a breather and regroup. And for a time, other advertisers may focus less on blogs, at least until the next unprecedented event pushes blogs back into the spot-light as THE revolutionary media of the 21st century.

In any case, relative to today’s fortissimo, political ad volume in coming days weeks may seem pianissimo. Don’t freak. Averaging out the daily shouts and whispers, the long-term trend for blog advertising is still in a sharp crescendo.