The last couple of days have seen a discussion going on about blog consolidation for both revenue and survival reasons. The discussion has primarily been centered around 2 video posts by Aaron Brazell, one by Duncan Riley, a post by Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins and finally a Discussion Point podcast by myself here on WinExtra. Much of what Duncan referred to in his videocast was the advantages of a blog co-op to be able to deal with advertisers on a more equal footing for better CPM deals. Aaron on the other hand was more interested in an alliance as a way to consolidate our blogging voice in order to reduce the echo chamber effect that can occur as we all scramble to post current stories.

Myself I agreed to a point with Duncan over the advantages from an advertising revenue stream point of view but had a problem with what Aaron has suggested regarding an alliance based on content distribution. I can understand where he is coming from and while I can also see how it might work I am doubtful over the long haul of the viability of such an alliance. The other two points that I tried to make against the idea of blog consolidation or roll up is the potential effect on both the readers and the bloggers should these roll ups fail at some future point.

Well that future point – if this morning’s announcement by AOL is any indication – has started to arrive. My points that I originally tried to make was what happens should a blogger decide to be rolled up; or consolidated into a larger network, and the point comes when their corporate bosses decide that it is time for them to do some radical cost cutting and axes those rolled up blogs. This is exactly what has happened with this morning’s report via the Washington Post (which came via The Blog Herald story) about AOL shutting down, putting on hiatus or extremely limited posting schedules several of their heavy hitter blogs.

According to the report DIYLife.com is going to be closed down, DownloadSquad apparently is going into hiatus and The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) will be doing only limited Apple Apps postings. The thing is that none of these blogs are small fry within their niches and have good numbers behind them according to compete.com

The only one of the three to see any downward numbers over the last year has been DownloadSquad but even that downward trend wasn’t disastrous and easily could have turned around.

So again I come back to the point I had made previously that being that in the end when consolidations; or roll ups, happens the bloggers involved and the users could end up being the losers in the end. The users because they no longer have those trusted voices that they would normally go to for information and news. For the bloggers involved – especially if they are the ones who founded the blogs originally are now doubly screwed. Not only have they lost their income but they no longer own that blog brand which means if they still love what they are doing they will have to start over again. That in itself is an increasingly difficult proposition given the blog marketplace.

While folks like Aaron and Duncan might think that different implementations of blog consolidation might have benefits doing something like this is something that bloggers really need to be careful about. After all once you reach a certain stage of popularity it is no longer just something you are doing for fun – there are a lot of people out there who count on you to be there everyday. This is your real value – you readership and sometimes they have to be taken into consideration above and beyond the fact of how much they are worth in some roll up deal.

Conversation Tags: blogs, consolidation, weblog inc