The year of the blog

Recent Post

Media and the Manila Hostage Crisis

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The perfect case study

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Media buying: Print up close (Part 2)

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Media buying: Print up close

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Media in the news

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It’s been around more than five years, but it’s only been in the recent few weeks that Web Logs, or Blogs for short, have taken a centerstage position in the collective consciousness of Philippine society.

We are, of course, talking about one blog in particular – that of Brian Gorrel, a.k.a. the DJ Montano blog.

The Internet has long been proclaimed as the final medium – the one media channel that will equalize access, airplay, and exposure for everyone. This is now finally becoming evident in how the ubiquitous blog has begun to pervade every sector of the intelligentsia. It is unique in the sense that it draws audiences from the most difficult to reach sectors: the glitterati, the culturati, the literati, along with every other wannabe.

While majority of ratings, and consequently advertising pesos, remain concentrated in the old, established tri-media mainstays like telenovelas, fantaseryes, sitcoms, gag shows, personality programs on radio, and the most highly circulated broadsheets and tabloids, it is now quite evident that the Internet as a medium has finally reached critical mass and can therefore command audiences in the same scales as traditional media.

So it wasn’t your ordinary, garden variety website or homepage that did it, not even a really well laid-out Multiply site loaded with lots of photos, did the trick. Social networking engines like Friendster and Facebook almost made it. Their many copycats have even less chances of making it: Ringo, LinkedIn, Tagged, Reunion.com, and so on… ad nauseam. Yahoo! and Google certainly commanded a lot of attention, and made it… not even YouTube made it. In the end, it was the simple blog that turned the Internet into an honest-to-goodness viable alternative communications medium, drawing thousands of eyeballs to the same published content, rivaling the audience sizes of many other traditional media channels.

There are now advertisers who are asking their media agencies to identify the most popular blogs so that they could tap into these rapidly growing new media channel. This is not easy. By their very nature, blogs do not lend themselves very well to advertising. The format does not provide the proper environment for it. The most that can be done is to sneak in little snippets of ads like Google ads.

The blog is citizen journalism in its purest form. You write whatever you want, you post it, and anybody who cares or bothers can read it. It is that simple. Of course a lot of questions arise about this near absolute freedom of speech – issues about veracity of content and criminal liabilities for libelous and slanderous statements, although that rightfully belongs to another story, perhaps even another column. I dare not wade in that direction. Let others speak. My interest is limited to assessing the blog as a medium.

So what makes it so special? Doesn’t email give you the same info as a blog? Don’t you actually get more info from other sites?

The answer is actually quite simple: it was never really the medium that drove people to a particular media channel. It was always content. Let’s look at a comparison: soon after the first EDSA revolution, the government returned ABS-CBN to the Lopez family and they quickly worked on reinstating its signal back to its old prominence, as a top-rating television station. During the Marcos years, it had been renamed BBC, the Banahaw Broadcasting Corporation. But all throughout that time it was the laughing stock of the broadcast and advertising industries. It had such a poor signal and therefore an equally crappy reception, you couldn’t bear watching it no matter how hard you tried. At one point, the powers-that-be even tried forcing people to watch it by transferring the PBA Games there. At the time, the PBA was, hands down, the single biggest crowd-drawer, both at the Coliseum and at every TV screen all over the country. But even the most avid basketball fans were not willing to wreck their eyes just to watch their favorite games. It was a joke. And it wasn’t funny.

To make a long story short, the first thing that the Lopez family did was to fix the signal. And in a matter of weeks, it had one of the brightest, cleanest receptions on regular television. But still nobody watched it. Nena Gonzalvez, one of the most senior media reps, asked me straight why I wouldn’t buy a single spot in their newly relaunched station.

I simply said, “People do not turn on their TV sets to watch a channel; they tune into a particular channel to watch their favorite shows.” In other words, unless they started airing some “watchable” programs, they would never get any viewers. They were showing 20-time reruns of the oldest movies imaginable. Some of them were still in black and white. And I could have sworn some of them could have passed for silent movies.

So El Kapitan Don Geny Lopez hired Freddie Garcia (FMG) to fix his content problem. And the first thing FMG did was – what else? – he pirated the top-rating shows from IBC Channel 13, like Goin’ Bananas and Okay Ka Fairy Ko. And, as they say, the rest is history.

Going back to the Internet, it is quite obvious now that it is content that people are interested in, not format. People flock to a blog not because it has a fancy lay-out, or even colorful photos. People flock to it because they want to read a story.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions advanced in this article is the author’s own, and may not necessarily represent the views and opinions of THE LOBBYiST, its editors, or its publishers.

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