B.L. Ochman (the picture is from her Whatsnextblog) has already broken this, but this week's a-clue.com newsletter features a piece on blogging business models, written following the Blognashville conference.

Enjoy.

I spent the weekend at Blognashville, a gab-and-egofest for about 100 (mostly male, mostly middle-aged) bloggers at Belmont University in Nashville (a pricey pimple on the bottom of Vanderbilt) to fuss over Glenn Reynolds (much nicer in person than online) and to search for meaning.

The big question: how will we make money off this?

People are investing a ton of time and effort in blogging. Volunteers get burned out if they can't find money. All institutions are built on money. At Nashville we all felt we were in the gold fields and no one seemed to have made a strike.

There's a Clue there. Nearly all those 49'ers (and Alaska 98'ers) who went in with pick and shovel failed. It was those who went in with a business model, professional mining companies or merchants such as Levi Strauss, who succeeded.

Some 99% of blogs (including mine) go about the publishing question backwards. That is, we look at the process from the writer's point of view, not the reader's. This is forgivable in that bloggers are writers, but this is one of the key differences between writers and publishers. Publishers create for the market.

That is, publishers define the readers they want, the content those readers need, and the advertisers they will hit-up to pay the bills. They then order the production of the product, and keep an eye out to make sure it meets the readers' requirements.

In other words, the difference between blogging and journalism lies entirely on the business side of the shop. Publishers are just as likely to pay for lies as bloggers are to make stuff up. The difference is the publishers create lies that appeal to their audiences, while bloggers write lies that appeal to themselves.

This is easy to understand when you look at the professional blogs that are run by publishers - Weblogsinc, Gawker Media, and Paid Content. Jason Calacanis, Nick Denton and Rafat Ali defined the readers they wanted, created a business model, then hired writers to fulfill the mission.

In contrast I found, at blognashville, that even the most-popular bloggers are mere dilletantes. This is a term Glenn Reynolds applied to himself. Dave Winer, with whom I spent pleasant hours, is also doing his blog on-the-side - his business is RSS. I was surprised to find myself the most knowledgeable businessperson in the room, and I'm a complete failure.

When you're led by amateurs you can't expect professional standards to be upheld. Yet, on the editorial side, blogs often do just that. It's on the business side where they all fall down.

Still, I saw several potential business models at the conference:

• The Tom Sawyer Business Model - Get people to do your work for free. This is what the free blogospheres like MSN Spaces, Blogger.com and even some political sites are all about. (Illustration from PBS' Mark Twain Special. They originally got it from the Mark Twain House.)
• The Flo Ziegfeld Business Model - The free blog gives you a taste of the paid goodies inside. This is what Drew Kaplan is doing at dak2000 He calls his advice items "Easter Eggs," which get people to spend money with him. Podcasting is mostly built around this business model.
• The Karl Rove Business Model - The blog makes the pig sponsoring it look worth kissing. A lot of consultants are trying to do this within corporations, get them to sponsor blogs that humanize them. Organizational blogs are often of this type.
• The Zack Exley Business Model - The blog acts as a recommendation engine that pushes people toward giving to the sponsors' favored causes. Zack has pioneered this at Moveon. Great business model, but losing politics so far.
• The Chuck Barris Business Model - The bloggers are selling themselves, looking for work. I sometimes feel very much like a "Gong Show" contestant. "A lot of people who never made money performing think the Internet will let them do this," said Henry Copeland, who launched Blogads.
• The Wyatt Earp Business Model - The independent blogger is attached to a larger organization and gives it his credibility in exchange for money. The blogger is looking to become a hired gun. I do this at ZDNet. Romanesko does this at Poynter.
• The Charles Foster Kane Business Model - Advertising. One publisher on Friday night insisted that "CP/Ms have to go up." But online ad space is practically infinite. They don't.

  Then there were the idealists who said that you don't need a business model, that blogging is about passion, and that recognition should be enough. There's something to be said for that. I've been working without pay for years now. But there is also such a thing as burnout. Everyone who has ever been a volunteer understands this. And many technology movements have moved, like blogging, through stages of interest, excitement, prediction, exhaustion and failure.

  Blogging is now in the third phase.

  ---

  Update: While on the phone with B.L. earlier this week, I thought of another possible model.

  • The Andrew Sullivan Business Model - Busking. Begging. Entertain the peeps with your blog and put out a begging bowl. It could be sponsored by Amazon, or PayPal, or just ask for bucks repeatedly.
    

  Then, this morning, reader Chris Woolfolk came up with this reaction to my column. "What if blogists grouped together with similiar subjects to offer a higher value proposition in a subscription profit idea."

  Thus:

  • The Harold Ross Business Model - Print the best of the blogs and distribute them. Turn it into a newspaper or magazine.
    

  Actually, I learned at Blognashville that the Rocky Mountain News and Denver Post want to do precisely this. The best items submitted on their blog will, over time, be edited, printed in local editions, and distributed with the regular newspaper one day a week.

  Keep 'em coming, folks. You'll make me a living yet.