One of the lessons we learned last year from the first BlogWorld & New Media Expo was that coordinating over 100 seminars with 130+ speakers is too much for one man to do. Don’t get me wrong we were very proud of what we accomplished with the world’s largest blogging conference last year and the All Star line up of speakers. Dave Taylor did an awesome job and will be back this year but we wanted to get him some help.

So this year we will have “Track Leaders” for some of the critical content. The “Monetization” track would be at the top of that list. By far our most popular track last year it was important we found the right person to lead. Award winning blogger, affiliate marketer extraordinaire and international man of mystery Jim Kukral is that person.

**Obligatory Bio info here**

For over 10-years, Jim has actively participated in the Internet marketing industry in multiple roles. Because of his wide range of work experience during those years, Jim is able to bring a well-rounded perspective to the industry. Jim has been blogging since 2001 and has established himself as a leading expert in the field. In 2006, Jim was awarded the Affiliate Summit Pinnacle Awards “Best Blogger” award. He is also the former publisher of ReveNews.com, a group blog focused on the billion-dollar online monetization industry. Jim is a graduate of The University of Akron where he studied public relations and marketing. In the time since finishing his education Jim has started to own web firms and projects and has marketed and promoted thousands of websites, blogs and other online ideas. Nowadays Jim focuses on the business of online video and online publishing tools, as well as actively participating as a speaker and presenter at industry events. Jim is also the owner and operator of Scratchback.com, an online ad publishing system to help website and blog owners make money online.

**end obligatory bio info**

To summarize Jim has been walking the walk earning money via his blog and teaching other bloggers how to do the same for a long time. On top of that he is an all around good guy and eats his spinach. For those of you who don’t know Jim take a quick look at his introduction of last year’s closing keynote speaker at BlogWorld Mark Cuban. This was the first time the two had met in person after Jim had created the infamous “Mark Cuban Please Call Me” website about a year earlier.

Please join me in welcoming Jim to the team.

We are accepting speaker proposals for the 2008 BlogWorld & New Media Expo here until May 31st.

Just about two months ago 24/7 Wall Street included ARS Technica in their 25 most valuable blogs list and set the price market price at $15 million. If today’s reports of ARS Technica’s sale to Conde Nast are true the price was actually $25 million. That’s a 66% increase over 24/7’s valuation. Does that mean Gawker Media which topped the list at $150 million is really closer to $250 million?

Does that make the Huffington Post worth $116 million =?

Is TechCrunch then worth $60 mil? (side note does this purchase of ARS Technica by Wired’s parent company put a new spin on the recent Wired TechCrunch dust up?)

One thing it certainly does is make everyone else on that list very happy today. It should make every other serious new media content creator happy as well.

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I was doing some research this morning on the difference between ad revenue online vs. print for the newspaper industry. For several years now print ad revenues for newspapers has been declining while online ad revenues have been increasing at double digit rates since at least 2004 (earliest statistics from NAA).

As The Recovering Journalist pointed out in March of 2006, online ad revenue is basically replacing print ad revenue in the newspaper industry.

That got me to thinking just how big could the New Media industry become?

If you have ever heard me get on my soap box you know I believe new media represents the reinvention of newspapers, magazines, radio and television all at the same time. Eventually I guess you could throw feature length films in there as well ($26.7 billion). But lets just stick with the first four for now. 

According to NAA the newspaper business is currently a $59 billion dollar industry.

Broadcast radio sits at $21.3 billion.

Broadcast TV $57 billion.

The best number I can find for magazine publishing is $70 billion annually. This is a tricky category due to the segmentation between consumer, B to B, other niches and tendency of the industry to include trade show revenue  with print advertising but this seems like a conservative number. (If anyone has better data I welcome your input).

That gives us a grand total $2.7 trillion dollars in annual revenue up for grabs. Do I expect New Media to steal every dollar away from traditional media? No but those, revenues will not remain static either. 

Predictions of on line ad revenues eventually equaling their print and broadcast counterparts are numerous so it is only logical to conclude that for new media content creators time is on our side and the revenues will eventually come. That doesn’t mean every blogger will be rich (more on that in another post) but it does mean a lot more will be able to earn living doing it regardless of the genre of their content. And many thousands of bloggers, podcasters, Internet TV and Radio broadcasters will in indeed make it big and become “rich”.

So if you are passionate about your content, keep working hard and one day you very well may be more than just “Internet famous”.

Tim Bourquin from New Media Expo has a must read post up today. Here is a small excerpt:

In the “old days” anyone who was famous in the media had the big bucks that naturally accompanied that fame. But these days, there seems to be a whole lot of folks that are “Internet famous” because of blogging, podcasting, Twitter, flickr, etc. and yet need to ask their audience for donations in order to buy a better microphone. It’s a bizarre and ironic result of the ability for anyone and everyone to start producing content and gather an audience.

I think we just need to be patient and if you look at the history of traditional media you will see lots of similarities to where we are today but more on that later. Tim Continues:

Twitter, blogs, podcasts and new media in general have created a wave of “famous” people - people with a “wealth” of attention and inbound links, but can’t pay their bills at the end of the month. Worse yet, some seem to think that if you do find a way to make your living successfuly, you’ve “sold out” and are no longer true to your audience. That’s a shame and it needs to change.

The “link” and “attention” may be the currency of the Internet, but until someone can show me how to pay my mortgage by linking to my bank once a month, that just doesn’t fly with me.

A commenter on Tim’s blog Trey hit on it, and another commenter Nick touched on it as well. I will begin to play the broken record I have been playing for a couple of years now. We are at the beginning of this “new media” thing. Of course very few are getting rich. (quite a large number are making some kind of money) . Most people in this “industry” don’t even realize they are in an industry. Many of them are just hobbyists with no real aspirations to grow beyond that (like Nick’s analogy to bands).

As Trey pointed out when radio first came along DJ’s weren’t rich, very few musicians were rich in the early days either. Actors weren’t rich when movies first came long. Athletes certainly weren’t. Sure they might have been famous but they were lucky to eek out a living. Sound familiar?

As those industries matured the money came. What brought the money?

First audience then advertisers and sponsorships. Along with those things came producers, distributors, and of course managers who took their cut.

Even today there are bands with very little “fame” who make a damn good living playing their brand of music. While countless others who may have more talent make little to nothing. In most cases the difference is a good business sense or a manager who has that business sense to go along with their talent.

Good content creators are not common, great content creators are rare. There are very few Madonna’s or Elvi, or Harrison Ford’s and a lots of character actors with bit parts or working in commercials. There are hundreds of thousands of musicians playing small clubs or making jingles for commercials and countless waiters out there who consider themselves actors, singers and artists.

In fact it is a testament to the awesome power of new media that so many people are making money or even making a living and in some cases getting rich already. Anyone see the recent list of the 25 most valuable blogs?

Gawker media worth $150 million? Huffington Post $70 million? TechCrunch $30 million? Yes those are subjective estimates but by any measure the owners of those sites are “rich” at least on paper.

What New Media has done is to lower the barrier of entry for all of us. At least some musicians were able to make a living without being “Rock Stars” before new media came along, but radio broadcasters? Actors? Producers? Writers?

No way. You needed to land a job with the local paper, network affiliate, movie studio or land a book deal with a publisher. Not any more. I am not saying we have cut out those middle men, but they are no longer mandatory to success. Now you can be successful on a much smaller scale with very little to zero investment. You can scale your “brand of content”.

That doesn’t mean that all other business rules are out the window. If you believe yourself to be a great content creator who should be rich and famous but don’t know how to make money doing it, then learn or find yourself a manager who does, or go to work for a network that can help you make money.

By the way New Media has opened lots of doors for folks in those more mature industries of entertainment. Quite a few traditional journalists, photographers, etc are now striking out on their own to make a living with new media. BlogCritics, and The Politico would be two great examples of that. Founded by traditional journalists who are now creating and controlling their own content and syndicating it back to traditional media. Sports like MMA that used to be drowned out by the MLB,NFL and NBA have new ways to reach their fans and new doors that may have never opened to them without new media.

So be patient my friends. The money will come and like so many other things Internet related, it will come at warp speed compared to traditional media’s history.

One last note if you are serious about learning how to monetize your content then Tim’s show is a great place to do it, and of course so is BlogWorld.

This is really a test and my first attempt at embedding video on the blog. I did a quick interview with Zac at Affiliate Summit on my new Flip Camera. I did cut the video a little short. About an hour after this interview during his keynote Jason Calacanis showed a slide of Zac’s famous $300,000 check; along with a photo of Shoemoney and his $100k check. Jason stated this was chump change and that both could make far more money if they applied their genius to developing the next block buster dot-com.

If everything goes as planned, here is the interview: