Gather Aims to Build a Blog Content Marketplace

Gather has been getting fair amount of media attention over the last several weeks.

The site is a marketplace for blog content and they are actively recruiting bloggers by offering them a share of their ad revenue. As with Newsvine, the more popular your contributions, the higher your earning potential.

As the Boston Globe notes, it’s going to be very difficult for these guys to succeed with this model. As I have said previously, a Web 2.0 crash is coming. The online ad market isn’t big enough to support this site. What’s worse, they’re not relying on Adsense. They’re trying to court advertisers themselves. They don’t have the deep pocket corporate backing that Bloglines, Topix, Yahoo and others have to support citizen journalism with a big investment.

Steve Rubel is a PR strategist with nearly 16 years of public relations, marketing, journalism and communications experience. He currently serves as a Senior Vice President with Edelman, the largest independent global PR firm.

He authors the Micro Persuasion weblog, which tracks how blogs and participatory journalism are changing the public relations practice.