Blogs, Ad Networks and the future of the Associated Press

I first mentioned a rumor reported on TechCrunch about Federated Media receiving $50 Million in funding. TechCrunch reports that the rumor is indeed true. It will be fascinating to see what they do with the money. While they aren’t saying just yet, I’m certain that they do have a plan. Congrats guys.

It was interesting that this showed up in my aggregator today because I was just thinking about Federated Media and other ad networks after reading this post by paidContent.org

For a sense of the dramatic shift at the Associated Press in the digital age, consider this: by 2009, less than 25 percent of Associated Press revenues will come from member newspapers.

I have long wondered at the continued value of the Associated Press in a world of blogs. Here in Boise we have a small AP office with about 3-4 reporters staffed there. There are probably 10x that number of good bloggers that cover politics, business and news (probably another 10x of not so good bloggers) and while the number of AP reporters goes down, the number of bloggers continues to rise.

Now our AP reporters are really really good. Some of the best journalist I’ve ever met, but like Wikipedia to Britanica, enough decent bloggers can turn out as much good content as a few AP journalists.

But what news source has the time to filter all the millions of blogs, looking for the best stories. Aggregators like Digg, Mixx, and TechMeme do this, but what about the really good non tech local/regional content? It’s pretty hard to find that stuff. Social tagging sites like Del.icio.us and Diigo help but they aren’t perfect.

I think this is a business opportunity for ad networks like FM to step in and offer some help. We already know many reporters get there news ideas from blogs, why couldn’t newspapers just republish blogs?

Newspapers could pay ad networks the right to republish the best content from the blogs in their network. The payments could be distributed through the network based on who had the most posts republished (all with attribution of course).

This would expose bloggers to new audiences, give newspapers to great unique content and the ad networks could do what they already do so well, match the content to the money and take a cut.

In final thoughts the risk that ad networks face is highlighted in this post also by paidContent.org:

AOL has bought out Sphere, a blog and news contextual display service, for an undisclosed amount.

Sphere was one of FM’s content partners. Great sites are going to get bought or at some point think they can do a better job on there own. This will require that ad networks are continually looking for the next big sites and as Chas Edwards is quoted in the TechCrunch article:

The stability of our relationship with content creators will come from the value we create every day, not from our contracts.