Social media – its what almost every blogger eats, sleeps, drinks and breathes these days. Some are said to even excrete social media from their pores. As popular as social media is, many writers are suffering from a decreased CPM at the hands of social networks. How can writers adapt and evolve in a world where social networks are quickly sapping the life from individual websites?

Many people who aren’t really attuned to what is happening on the intertubes are still under the impression that the biggest issue is that online publications are quickly taking away business from print publications. Though that hasn’t stopped being true, it’s yesterday’s news. Those internet publications that have stolen the business of print publications are now in danger themselves as social networks start sapping all the internet limelight. The hunters have become the hunted.

The irony is that many websites and blogs are staunch supporters of social networks like FriendFeed and actively promote on the very networks that are slowly killing them. The problem is that, to stay competitive and on the cutting edge of the internet, websites are forced to actively promote on social networks; however, by promoting material on social networks, those websites are playing a part in lowering the same CPM rates they rely on.

FriendFeed is one of the more controversial platforms on the internet currently. FriendFeed is a rather creative aggregator of many social networks including Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Gtalk, and many others. FriendFeed brings all your different social activities to one platform and allows you to update your friends on all your activity (and stay updated yourself) in one convenient, though unattractive and occasionally unwieldy, platform.

Perhaps most significant of FriendFeed is that writers can set their accounts to log all their articles as part of their activity. However, friends and curious onlookers are allowed to comment and create discussion directly on FriendFeed, which detracts from traffic that would normally go to the website on which the material is published. To put it simply, that takes money out of writers’ pockets.

Not only that, it puts the money writers should be making directly into the pockets of the social networks that index their work. FriendFeed is just an example; other platforms display entire articles, which keeps readers from clicking on to the original sites.

Shyftr is a controversial social blog aggregator that allows users to see complete articles from their favorite sites directly from Shyftr, much like an RSS reader, just on illegal steroids. Writers might as well not even contribute material to the internet if sites like Shyftr are allowed to operate without crediting or compensating writers for their work as Shyftr is now doing.

CPM drives web publications. Clicks per thousand impressions (CPM) is term for the revenue a site generates from advertising. According to CNET, what was once considered a considerably low CPM rate has dropped to a pitifully low of 3 cents for some sites.

The question is what exactly can be done to build CPM on an internet that is becoming increasingly social-oriented? It would seem that writers need to re-evaluate profit models and start developing more social-focused revenue strategies to stay competitive. Obviously abandoning social platforms entirely would be foolish. There are other ways of generating revenue through social means that don’t entirely rely on CPM income.

Gary Vaynerchuck of WineLibraryTV is one of the forerunners of social marketing. His wine-tasting vlog is followed by wine lovers across the globe, but Gary doesn’t rely on his traffic to pay the bills. In fact, WineLibraryTV is simply one way Gary Vaynerchuck goes about marketing himself and his family wine store. Along with his vlog, Gary is an active speaker on social marketing, “tweets” frequently, and has fingers in just about every social platform and network out there.

By staying socially active and maintaining a high-profile internet personality, Gary is able to use his website and social activities to drive business to his family’s business and sell his new book “101 Wines.” That might blow the minds of writers and publishers of CPM-based websites, but Gary V. ain’t hurting for publicity, work…and probably least of all, money.

Web media is changing, for better or for worse, and the writers and publishers that stay afloat will be those that are willing to adapt and evolve. With social networks quickly stealing the focus on the internet, writers and publishers will have to move past CPM-based models and work towards using the advances in social media to their advantage.

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Entry was posted on Wednesday, June 4th, 2008 at 2:52 pm under Advertising, Social Media.

Read more entries by Triston McIntyre.
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