Kevin at PubliusTX points out the reaction of Pegasus News to an article in the Dallas Morning News about how blog readership is "on the decline." The piece unfortunately focuses on political blogs as the bellwhether for the entire "industry," however. Sure, political blogs made huge amounts of news in the months (even a year) before 2004's presidential election, but just because they've had a drop in their traffic doesn't mean the medium (or whatever you want to call it) is on the way down a gully. I think not, frankly. For one thing, media calling out blogs is like that whole pot, kettle thing - except the kettle just came off the assembly line and the pot is a hand-me-down.

Although the influence of blogs has grown, they attract only a fraction of the number of readers tallied by traditional media outlets' Web sites. Organizations such as the Associated Press and CBS News were among the fastest-growing news and political sites last month, according to Nielsen//NetRatings.

Yet another writer appears to miss the point - at least in her article. Colleen McCain Nelson is focused on a drop in traffic and blogs being able to hang on to the little they have, rather than the fact that they work with the "traditional media outlets" by posting commentary, links, and additional information about news. For instance, if you take a site like mine, I have experienced little or no drop because of political discussions being minimized - in fact, November was my biggest month, with stories like the NBA brawl coverage and "Monday Night Football" shenanigans drawing a ton of readers. Sure, it's "niche" here at TMD, but niche isn't a bad thing in this case - it's a way of life.

Not once does Nelson even mention the "bloated" numbers that BlogAds was raking in. On November 4, BusinessWeek's Sarah Lacy wrote an article asking about "Life after Nov. 2." In that item, BlogAds owner Henry Copeland said that "Many single days this year we have equaled our entire 2003 revenues." Think about that for a second - the growth was phenomenal, but the 40% decline was just the sign of the slippery slope. Right. It's no wonder that meeting analysts' expectations make your stocks drop on the market - they must be following similar logic.

This is the kind of article that peeves me so much and keeps me following the media as a whole. If you weren't familiar with blogging at all, you could look at this and say "See Martha, I knew there wasn't any money on those blogs - they're just another fad. Tell Tommy to stop wasting time on his LiveJournal already."

Part two of this is that Nelson has done one thing - quantified blogging by the revenues generated. Let's put it this way - if the revenues that exist now vanished, MANY sites, including mine, would continue posting quality content, not worried about getting 200 visitors instead of 1,000, and that would be that. Sure, the money's great, and I'm not complaining, but no one was paying me to spend countless hours (and a few hundred bucks) getting this site up and running in the first place - so should it stop me from being in the game now? Heck no.

[hat tip: Kimberly]