While amusing myself by reading about the reignited discussion on blog advertising, sponsored posts, etc. (see recent posts by Chris Brogan and Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb), I thought long and hard about trying to jump into that debate.

Instead of adding noise to that discussion (I have limited experience in monetization of a blog), I thought I’d discuss a theme that both men touch upon in their posts:  where did blogging come from?  Stick with me, folks:  although this is going to be a meta discussion, I want to point you toward a resource that shows that this is actually an old question with some history that might be relevant to today.

Image by gastev

What is blogging?

Two interesting points of view come from both Chris and Marshall’s posts.  Marshall calls blogging a young medium, per the following:

Blogging is a beautiful thing. The prospect of this young media being overrun with “pay for play” pseudo-shilling is not an attractive one to us.

His point of view is pretty clear on a certain form of monetization (the process or means of using your blog to generate income).

Chris talks about bloggers (i.e. those of us who write online and use blogging software to publish and distribute our work) in the following paragraph:

Bloggers aren’t journalists. Bloggers are people who use blogging software. There are journalists who blog. There are bloggers who aspire to journalistic standards.

And so on.

Well, guess what?  The antecedents of blogs aren’t exactly new things.  Amateur writers and self-publishers have been around for a long, long time.

Before we had blogs, we had these things called zines.

What are zines?

Zines (short for fanzines) are amateur publications which are normally created and distributed by their author or, in some cases, a small team of people.  Zines are normally written by average people who have a near obsessive interest about some topic and the energy to create material about it.  Zines have been published independently for many, many years, or within the confines of an amateur press association (APA).

APAs have been around since 1876 (the National Amateur Press Association – is still alive and kicking as of the writing of this blog post; I used to belong to APA Centauri, which has been kicking around for close to 30 years).  Zines and blogging have really been around since the days of Martin Luther and Paul of Tarsus, although they weren’t called zines or blogs in those days.  True, they might not have had hyperlinks or any electronic presence, but many common concepts apply.

The Inner Swine is an example of a zine, written by Jeffrey Somers, which also happens to have a cool little Web presence.

How are zines like blogs and vice versa?

The Inner Swine (vol. 7, Issue 2 June 2001) has an article called Mr. Mute’s Guide To Making A Zine which helps illustrate the point that I’m trying to make.  The article lists five points about making a zine, which I’m going to paraphrase here:

1. Decide what kind of zine you’re going to put out - Jeffrey lists different types of zines like perzines (zines about a person’s life experience), music zines, and more.  Sound familar?
2. Actually create some material – same as blogging: you gotta write stuff, take photos, etc.
3. Then, just @#$%ing do it. Typeset, layout, collate, etc. - similar to the process of putting some life behind your content with formatting, images, hyperlinks, etc.
4. Give the @#$%ing thing away – isn’t most blogging just giving content away?
5. Stop &*@#ing off on your first issue and put out the second. – in other words, keep going.  Repeat.

The biggest difference between zines and blogs – publication and distribution

The biggest difference between these two types of content are publication (call it Webification, if you like) and distribution.   Pubication is the process of creating the finished product.  Distribution is the process of getting the product out to places where people can find and read it.

In the pre-electronic era, zine publishers had to spend increasingly large amounts of money to distribute their content.  Publication also cost some money, but it was mainly things like printer ink, paper, etc.  Mass production of a zine was the cost of photocopying, which could add up if you wanted to create hundreds of copies.

I would argue, however, that distribution would have been the real killer.  Either you:

• mailed out the zine
• distributed it by hand
• or convinced some book store, music store or comic book store owner to carry the zine for you.

For example, I got my copy of The Inner Swine several years ago at a cool book store called Quimby’s in Chicago.  You can buy zines from Quimby’s, and the small number of places like it around the world, and then somehow the author would get reimbursed.  Mr. Mute (or Mr. Sowers, I guess) talks about giving your zines away (point 4) but the realities of distribution is that many zine authors would distribute by mail at a moderate price to help cover the costs of distribution.

The interesting thing is that zine publishers built up their distribution networks over time with a combination of word of mouth advertising; zine trades; reviews (good old Factsheet Five); and places like Quimby’s.

It’s worth noting that zine publishers did go electronic prior to the Web era with mailing lists, news groups, bulletin boards, etc.

Bloggers have it easy when it comes to publication and distribution

Now, in this era of blogs, publication and distribution basically occur in a single process that’s virtually free to the publisher.  Mind you, you still need to tell the world about your blog, but the resulting networks to help promote content are very similar to the networks that zine publishers use.  Think social media, blog directories, blog reviews, etc.  A blogger can have a reach that many zine publishers would have given their kidneys for at a tiny fraction of the cost.

How much is an independent voice worth?

It’s also worth noting that some zines, like some of today’s blogs, did run ads as a means of cost-recovery or, in other cases, promoting friends, helpers, supporters, etc.  However, zine publishers were mavericks, independents, and free-speakers.  Editorial integrity was highly valued and assumed.

(Um, does this remind you of blogging at all?)

Here’s the thing, though:  paid zine writing, paid articles, etc. for willing sponsors barely existed, if it ever existed.  Why not?  Simple:  the economics just weren’t there. Few zine publishers, if any, could afford the necessary scale of distribution required to reach a mass audience.  I would have been very surprised if any large organization with any kind of ad budget would have deigned to entertain the notion of sponsored articles because zine audiences were selective, often anti-establishment, and too darned small.

The idea of advertiser-sponsored zine publications just would not have entered anyone’s minds (although I suppose it could have happened and some smart reader will find an example to point out where I’m wrong, which I’d like to see, actually) because they would have been seen as a waste of the advertiser’s money.

I do believe, however, that there would have been a few zine-publishers who would have been mighty tempted to cash in on some advertiser money.  It would have been a very human temptation in a marketplace that placed virtually all of the cost and risk in the hands of the publisher.

The new (yet ancient) media

So here we are in the 21st century.  Yes, Marshall, technically blogging is a young media, but the concepts behind it aren’t.  Self-publishing has a very long history and blogging is just the newest iteration with a number of neat value-added features to make it pretty cool.

Should blogging be kept pristine, free of any kind of monetization? I support monetization in principle because even though production and distribution costs are minimal, they still exist in a diminished form and being able to cover those costs is cool.  Moreover, there is always the opportunity cost of blogging (time not spent on other important things) which revenues can help compensate for.

As for whether sponsored posts are ethical, what the right way is to handle them, etc., I’ll let other, more experienced bloggers, marketers, analysts, etc. sort that out.  I really don’t know what to think about them.  I can’t see myself writing advertiser sponsored posts on Broadcasting Brain, but who knows what the future might bring?  (EDIT:  Mitch Joel weighs in with his post Ethics in Blogging for Dollars.)

However, the situations predate the current blogging era, in my opinion, and they will never really go away.  So we have to accept and learn how to deal with them, either by accepting, rejecting, or consciously ignoring them.

So that’s my opinion.  How about you, what do you think?  Do you see parallels between zines and blogs?  Do you see any differences that I might have missed that makes the comparison inaccurate?

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Other posts that you might enjoy reading:

• LOST and blogging about islands
• Learning or thrashing?
• Take the conn dear reader – strut your stuff!
• The birth of a nation – I mean a blog
• Thought for the day about blogging