One week after blog network Splashpress Media launched Performancing Ads, the young ad marketplace has reached a couple of milestones already:

1. Over 1300 blogs and websites added

2. Over 450 ads created and booked

3. Thousands of dollars in advertiser buys

We have added the College Money Network to our watchlist. From their About page:

[A] group of personal finance blogs run by college students, grad students, and recent grads. We have come together to bring you the best content possible to help college students and recent grads improve their finances in college and after college. While we all write about personal finance, we come from diverse backgrounds, and each one of us has our own unique perspective and voice.

Visit the College Money Network here.

The latest announcement from the Gawker Media network reads:

With a subtle peak, July 2008 surpassed the previous all-time traffic record (January’s MacWorld spike) to set a brand new record of 254 million monthly pageviews! For benchmarking against other publishers, that’s twice what the Los Angeles Times’ site LATimes.com received in July (source: Editor & Publisher). With growth over May and June at just over 6% each month, Gawker Media has resumed an aggressive but normalized upward trend.

AOL has launched a new site, just after the recent shutting down of their other properties due to budgetary constraints. The blog, Fanaticos falls under AOL’s Latino division. As Blog Herald reports:

The Spanish-language blog covers football/soccer, baseball and boxing from the United States, Mexico, Latin America and Spain. Nine sports bloggers comprise the editorial launch team.

Syntagma Media’s John Evans has published an article on the recent hardships endured by blog networks, which are tied to the economic downturn.

So what has the title of our post got to do with that? Well, that’s Evans’ answer to a timely question: What to do if you’ve invested heavily in an internet business, such as a blog network?

Evans writes:

Providing content on your own platform as both writer and publisher makes sense because it cuts costs. Hiring other writers to do it for you made sense three years ago, but with advertisers shunning small-to-medium operations it’s probably easier to flip burgers.

Now we need a second bounce to reflate the whole business of working successfully online.

The Blog Herald, one of the Net’s prime sources for blogosphere news and tips, has just undergone a sweet redesign, courtesy of Thord Daniel Hedengren.

Quoting TDH’s announcement:

The new design brings the content back in focus, which should mean a better flow and a more natural reading experience. We’ve got a simple top menu to make sure that you can dive into any main area of the site at any time, and the latest stories listed in traditional blog behaviour.

Chris Garrett has an interesting article over at our sister site, The Blog Herald. There he discusses the high overhead for blog networks, then segues into every blogger’s choice: whether to go at it alone or join a network.

Chris says:

Most beginning bloggers miss out a big chunk of their balance sheet. They mark their own time down as free, which you realize after you have been running any business for a while is a joke, your time is a very precious commodity indeed!

When you work with a network your role is quite clear. Writing, interacting and possibly promotion. Technical and design stuff “just happens”, advertisers are (hopefully) delivered on your behalf and traffic is boosted through the network effect and interlinking.

Last month, we reported on the Gawker Media Network’s lowering of its writers’ pay rates. Their new system pays writers based on the number of page views their posts generate.

Well, it appears that this new system is working for the network, based on the results of a research conducted by Bloggasm’s Simon Owens.

According to Simon (no pun intended!):

So now that six months have passed, has the new system resulted in increased traffic? To find this out I analyzed Site Meter statistics for 11 Gawker Media blogs (I didn’t include Io9 since it only recently launched). Overall, traffic for all Gawker blogs combined saw a 40% increase in page views. Each individual blog experienced an average increase of 49%.

Blog network Splashpress Media (owner of Blog Network Watch) has recently launched Performancing Ads, billed as the “ultimate advertising solution for both blog publishers and advertisers.”

As announced on the Performancing blog, the platform is “becoming the largest (and most diverse) network of publishers for the 125×125 ad format.”

Learn more about Performancing Ads here, or visit its main site.

In the past days, the b5media network added four new blogs. Three of them joined the Travel and Culture Channel, while the last entered the Music Channel:

• Travel Product Guide—“will focus on all the products you’ll need for travel”


• The Phoenix Traveler—“There’s lots going on in the desert year round, so stop by to get some ideas to on how to add some fun into your trip”


• Travel Photo Daily—“will take you around the world in photos”


• Canadian Music News—“brings you the latest videos and news on artists from Canada”