An entertaining set of models for types of blogs. An excerpt from Dana Blankenhorn’s post:

  • The Tom Sawyer Business Model - Get people to do your work for free. This is what the free blogospheres like MSN Spaces, Blogger.com and even some political sites are all about.
  • The Flo Ziegfeld Business Model - The free blog gives you a taste of the paid goodies inside. This is what Drew Kaplan is doing at dak2000. He calls his advice items “Easter Eggs,” which get people to spend money with him. Podcasting is mostly built around this business model.
  • The Karl Rove Business Model – The blog makes the pig sponsoring it look worth kissing. A lot of consultants are trying to do this within corporations, get them to sponsor blogs that humanize them. Organizational blogs are often of this type.
  • The Zack Exley Business Model – The blog acts as a recommendation engine that pushes people toward giving to the sponsors’ favored causes. Zack has pioneered this at Moveon. Great business model, but losing politics so far.
  • The Chuck Barris Business Model – The bloggers are selling themselves, looking for work. I sometimes feel very much like a Gong Show contestant. “A lot of people who never made money performing think the Internet will let them do this,” said Henry Copeland, who launched Blogads.
  • The Wyatt Earp Business Model – The independent blogger is attached to a larger organization and gives it his credibility in exchange for money. The blogger is looking to become a hired gun. I do this at ZDNet. Romanesco does this at Poynter.
  • The Charles Foster Kane Business Model - Advertising. One publisher on Friday night insisted that “CP/Ms have to go up.” But online ad space is practically infinite. They don’t.

[link via BL Ochman]

Actually – the best part of this was the reminder of that classic business history lesson, who made money in the gold rushes (California in 1849 and the Klondike in 1898). More from Dana:

Nearly all those 49′ers (and Alaska 98′ers) who went in with pick and shovel failed. It was those who went in with a business model, professional mining companies or merchants such as Levi Strauss, who succeeded.

Apply this to the blog world. Who is getting the funding, and who would you rather bet on to make the real money – the blog content businesses:Gawker, Weblogs Inc, and countless others who rely on ad revenue like all the old skool content shops they aim to replace. Or those providing them the tools: Six Apart, Newsgator, Feedburner?

Even that latter category is trying damn hard to lock in a viable business model. Newsgator is great, but not so dramatically better than the free alternatives that I would bet my own cash on it. I don’t see much money in aggregators. 

I like Feedburner because it appeals less to bloggers and more and more to marketers looking to smack metrics and track ROI from their blog investments – and marketers have budget. Lots of plays in this space – tools for marketers – could have some real long term legs, IMO.

As for the underlying engines themselves? The big freebies, like MSN Spaces and Yahoo 360, are ad revenue plays. They just rely on lots and lots of volunteers to create the content and drive the traffic for them. Blogger/Google is, well, Google. Who knows what their plans are around social software. The uber geeks host their own with tools like MovableType, .TEXT, Wordpress, and dasBlog, so no real business model in making those, mainly labors of love (MT is a unique case nowadays though). Six Apart, in my biased opinion since this site runs on it, has a potential winner in TypePad for professional-grade blog hosting. Until, that is, the freebies catch up.

Of all the businesses growing up around blogging, I’d bet on the value-add tools like Feedburner. They target the folks with the money to spend, with a service aimed at helping them understand ROI. Products like that, if done well, are gold.