Interview: Henry Copeland, CEO, Founder of BlogAds: To Make Money At Blogging, Rein In Comments
BlogAds' CEO and founder Henry Copeland stirred up the audience at Wednesday's Networked Journalism Summit with two points about blogs and advertising. First, he told attendees of the conference …
Context & Ripple Effects
Copeland's argument lands in the middle of a two-year-old debate over whether blogs are a real business at all: coverage going back to May 2006 asked whether the blogosphere was ready for more aggressive monetization, and a February 2007 analysis found that while bloggers can make money, most keep day jobs. His prescription — moderate the comments — treats the discussion thread as part of what an advertiser buys.
The venue matters too: he made the case at the Networked Journalism Summit, where the audience is exactly the cohort deciding whether to treat blogs as media properties rather than hobbies. It also extends the professionalization thread from earlier coverage of ethics questions around blogging for dollars — once money flows, standards follow.
First-order effects
- Bloggers on the BlogAds network now have a direct revenue lever tied to housekeeping: cleaning up comment sections becomes a precondition for attracting brand advertisers, not just community management.
- Advertisers evaluating blog placements get a new quality signal — Copeland's framing makes unmoderated threads a visible risk factor in whether a blog's inventory is worth buying.
Second-order effects
- Comment moderation shifts from free community practice to billable editorial labor, raising the cost floor for blogs that want ad revenue and widening the gap between hobbyist and semi-professional publishers.
- Rival ad networks and sponsors face pressure to adopt similar environment standards or explain why their inventory tolerates what Copeland calls revenue-killing comments.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the unit of sale in blog advertising becomes the whole page — post plus reader discussion — pushing the medium toward newspaper-style editorial oversight of everything published under a blogger's masthead, including what readers write.
The trend: Blog advertising is moving from paying for traffic toward paying for controlled environments, making editorial discipline — including over comments — the dividing line between monetizable and unmonetizable blogs.