Washington Post BlogRoll

Jeff Burkett of the Washington Post announced an innovative program today, to try to cross leverage the growing appeal of blogs and the Washington Post brand:

[from media landscaping: washingtonpost.com BlogRoll Program Launched]

Some bloggers are open to putting advertising on their site, so why not strike deals with them and help them do that. The revenue gets shared (in the bloggers favor of course) and we throw in one additional component...A link to their blog on the homepage of washingtonpost.com. With the potential of 8 Million monthly visitors seeing this link, it could very well be the catalyst that them noticed.

At this point this is an experiment to see what kind of interest we get from the bloggers out there. We have 3 partners at launch. Creative Weblogging, BootsNAll and AllBusiness. They each have tons of high quality blogs under their wings and have been great to work with so far.

Admittedly, right now the index box is a little small and may not be in the most prominent position on the page. Okay, so its definitely in the ghetto position, but its a start. If the blogosphere embraces this and we see a lot of interest from quality blogs we will grow the size of the index and give it better positioning on the page. We'll just have to wait and see.

I signed up, and here's what the sign up page looks like:

I wonder what the response will be like? As I recently pointed out (Blog Networks: Plazas and Directors Are Better), there is no reason for a blogger not to join every possible network: there doesn't appear to be a law of diminishing returns.

[Pointer from Steve Rubel]

[Update: 2:50pm 18 Aug: As Jeff Burkett commented here, he is on vacation this week and next -- a bad time to announce or release something like this -- so follow up will have to wait until he returns. I think he will have a very full inbox.]

tags: washington+post, jeff+burkett, new+media, old+media, blogging

Comments

[Jeff Burkett]

Stowe,

The response has been amazing today. I am on vacation this week and next, so needless to say, I am not able to keep up with it all....and my wife is getting pissed. Its time for me to sign off for a while :-)

Jeff