Transcript

[Music]

Interviewer: This is Vanessa Zamora here at Blogworld and New Media Expo we’re wrapping up here in the expo hall but we were just lucky enough to snag Jeremy Wright from b5 media to chat with us for a minute welcome and thank you for taking the time to be with us.

Interviewee: Can we shake hands again.

Interviewer: Yes. Absolutely this is official.

Interviewee: Yes.

Interviewer: Okay so tell me a little bit about b5 media I know you guys have what over 200 bloggers in your network.

Interviewee: Yeah we got around 250 to 300 blogs about 200 bloggers. We own the properties we do all the heavy lifting so bloggers don't need to worry about technology, their design, their marketing, their ads so you end up getting more traffic more money and joining a really great community at the same time.

Interviewer: What are some of the great bloggers we might have heard of that are actually affiliated.

Interviewee: Oh depends what your into right? When we got big bloggers like Darren Rose and we got great bloggers like Kristina Chew who is one of top autistic bloggers in the world. But unless you have an autistic kid you would never know about it right? And one of our top 10 blogs is an astronomy blog which blows your mind but and so we got a lot of big blogs that are celebrity and entertainment and that kind of interesting world.

Interviewer: You spoke and you were talking a little bit of monetizing your blog.

Interviewee: Bloggers think that ad sense is evil, which it is they think that they can do a lot better if they sold ads themselves but what they don't realize is that it takes a lot more scale than they think it takes things like real ad servers and a real sales team to actually do much more than ad sense will do and it ends up taking up a lot of time to do no better than if they had just let Google do it right? And so we try and stress things like we try and stress how important accurate data is because advertisers need it and if you are just relying on your server logs that's very different than how many ads are going show up for an advertiser just little things that we learn the hard way. And we take care of our bloggers we really try and spread the knowledge a little bit

Interviewer: Are you making any improvements to your analytics or what are you working on…

Interviewee: Yeah actually we just spent big bucks on analytics in the last two months and so we’ve signed with comScore which is kind of not accurate data but they produce its good for rankings. So it’s really accurate for ranking and so who's big in blogging or who's big in blog network’s right, who’s big in sports? Even if the actual number of uniques isn’t accurate the kind of ranking tends to be. Our primary analytics now is brought by Omniture which is expensive as hell, but third party, audited, verifiable, verified data and so when say our traffic numbers its like well Omniture’s staying behind it which obviously makes our investors happy but for advertisers means they have complete confidence. Whereas otherwise they might say they have that much traffic so we’ll discount it by half because that’s what every other company does right …

Interviewer: So now analytics is getting better we’re sort of seeing a shift in things and new media is obviously exploding, we’re getting the integration of video, where do you see this going in like the next five years?

Interviewee: Yeah I think the big thing is always going to be you know branded destinations that viewers actually enjoyed being on right because right now you see a lot of individual blogs you see a good podcast, a good video blog, or a good whatever and I think ultimately more information is good but more information presented in a way that users enjoy is better right? Friendfeed is interesting because you get to pull everyone’s content together but because you put everyone’s content together there is too much noise right? So two three five years down the road we think it really about providing experiences that are good for users in general and then users specifically. I think everything is good focusing on what people want is even better.

Interviewer: So just keep getting more and more specialized and better.

Interviewee: Yeah more from the…you will see probably a year or two of just more, more, more and then a year or two of okay lets actually focus out.

Interviewer: Do you think there is still going to be opportunity for your independent bloggers with all of this emerging media?

Interviewee: Yeah I mean…yes but at the end of the day bloggers who want to go full time or who want to be big have to have someone helping that because it was easy to make mistakes in the old days because nobody noticed right if you are signing a $5000 campaign with Sony not only will they notice they might sue you if things go wrong I think so you want a company who is going to take responsibility and do all the silly stuff that bloggers shouldn’t have to worry about. They shouldn’t have to worry about analytics really they shouldn’t have to worry about sales or you know you know the kind of silly stuff they should just be able to write so…

Interviewer: All right we are pretty much get pushed out of here with the broom and we have got tractors [Laughs]so Jeremy, it was great to meet you and thanks for sitting down and taking the time we hope to have you at Pubcon and Jeremy Wright from b5media and this is Vanessa Zamora Blogworld and New Media Expo, thanks for joining.

[edited by: Vanessa_Zamora at 2:53 pm (utc) on Oct. 13, 2008]