I was just reading a post on James Joyner’s Outside the Beltway, a right-leaning blog, where he also takes not of the bigger picture involving the collapse of Pajamas Media:

Then again, the New York Times and Slate and dozens of other established, high quality sites are having trouble figuring out a model for making money on the Internet.  There’s so much information out there wanting to be free that it’s hard to sell access to it.

Most of us started blogging as a hobby, never expecting to make any money from it.  For most, it may never rise beyond hobby. That’s the marketplace, though, and nobody owes any of us a living.

Again online ad revenue is down significantly, as is rest of the economy. Google recently announced laying off 6,000 employees – a first for the internet giant who mostly relies upon advertising revenue. You can also see that BlogAds is way down. Just look at some of the bigger sites out there and you will see empty boxes. Also Google AdSense ads that are running now are pretty much junk, as in they don’t pay that much.

I really think the left side of the blogosphere should pause for a minute and think before dancing on the Pajamas Media grave. Pajamas Media was the must vulnerable network out there, but now other networks could start failing. Some blogs have seen enormous growth over the past two cycles also, moving to high powered dedicated servers that cost hundreds a month to run and hiring on a staff of bloggers. These economic hard times will trickle down to them also.

There is another side to this equation that needs figured in also. Advertisers are tightening their purse strings. That means they are going to be more frugal with what money is available. Blogs are so specialized that it really limits what advertising may appear on it. For the local/state blogs, you can about forget it. Short of some new book, special interest group, or television special, there just isn’t much to advertise on a political blog. The only thing that leaves is the low paying ads like personal services, which pretty much stick with large networks like AdSense.

Like I said last night, this could provide to be a good cleansing of the blogosphere also. Instead of 50 sites all posting the same story when it breaks from a major news service, bloggers will have to work harder to survive. That or we will see some blogs move back to free services like Blogger because paying for that hosting service just isn’t in the budget anymore. In the end the strong blogs will survive, along with those of people who actually blog to blog, and not to make money. Come 2012, we might be faced with an entirely new blogosphere.