The Economist looks at efforts to monetise weblogs:
The most obvious way to do thischarging bloggers for the software they need to upload their commentary on to the webis probably not the answer.
A better way to make money may be to target advertising at those users. This is how search engines became profitable.
A simpler idea is therefore to run member-only blog pages and charge advertisers to sponsor them. This is the model that Tony Perkins, a founder of Red Herring, a now-deceased new economy magazine, is pursuing for his new firm, AlwaysOn. Meant to be a super blog, says Mr Perkins, AlwaysOn will let only good, insightful bloggers (if such can be found) post journal entries on its pages. This will draw a higher demographic of readers and thus better online responses to posts, says Mr Perkins.
