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Large blog Web sites like Gawker Media and Weblogs have offered blog writers another opportunity to cash in. These sites display their postings alongside that of many other writers, increasing bloggers' abilities to attract readers and advertisers.
So far, the idea seems to be working. Jason McCabe Calacanis, chief executive of Weblogs, a site acquired by the America Online unit of Time Warner this fall, said the site would generate a few million dollars this year. Weblog's 140 bloggers are paid based on how often they write, he said. A Forrester Research survey found in February that 64 percent of national marketers are interested in advertising on blogs.
Audi, for example, paid for about 70 million ads about its A3 compact model on 286 Web logs in the spring. Many of the blog ads featured links to other blogs that mentioned Audi's campaign for the A3, not to Audi's site, said Brian Clark, chief executive of GMD Studios, an experimental media firm that worked with Audi's advertising agency to create the campaign.
"It was a substantial buy, and it was a really effective buy for the campaign in terms of the response," Mr. Clark said. "You find that blogs are these series of citational records of what bloggers read. People with blogs read blogs. You get a feedback cycle."
Web logs also give advertisers the chance to aim at specific readers. If you want to advertise to New York Mets fans, for example, you can easily find blogs that cater to those readers, Mr. Clark said.
Last spring, Volvo spent several million dollars to sponsor Microsoft's MSN Spaces, a site that offers free Web logs and personal pages. The blog investment was worth it, said Anna Papadopoulos, the interactive media director at Euro RSCG 4D, a division of Havas that is running Volvo's Web log campaign. Since April, about five million pages have been set up by individuals, and a million people have visited Volvo's home page directly from the blog site, she said.
"These are people that we wouldn't have gotten through other marketing efforts," Ms. Papadopoulos said.
SBC Communications, which adopted the AT&T name on Monday, has found that advertisements on the blog site it started last fall, ProjectDU.com, have a higher click-through rate to its home page than its advertisements have had on other Web sites, said Michael Grasso, associate vice president for consumer marketing at AT&T.
Companies are also starting Web logs on their sites written by their employees. General Motors, for example, created two within the last year. Blogs may eventually replace many of the company's news releases, said Michael Wiley, director of new media for General Motors.
General Motors has also started to treat some Web log writers as it does traditional journalists, and is deciding which bloggers to invite to media showings of its new cars.
"It's very similar to media relations, but it's a little more grass roots," Mr. Wiley said. "The level of respect for certain influential bloggers is certainly growing."
When Piaggio USA, the makers of Vespa scooters, decided to include a Web log on its site, the company recruited Vespa customers who were already blogging about scooters. The two Vespa blogs, which started posting last summer, do not pay the writers and ask the writers not to sell later the material they write for Vespa.
One Vespa writer, Neil Barton, said he was willing to blog on Vespa's site free because of the visibility it would give his blogs, formerly published only on his own site, UrbanNerd.com.
"I just thought, well you know, no one really knows about UrbanNerd, but a lot of people know about Vespa, so it will be a cool way to get what I'm writing out there," said Mr. Barton, who lives in New Jersey. "The only limit I could see with Vespa is if I wanted to write about a competitor's scooter. I probably would post it on my blog as opposed to Vespa's."
