Dan,

I, too, have concerns about the sole-sponsor ad model -- mostly about the perception of how much it influences the editorial content of the blog.

Are you aware, can you point me to, plausible or extant ad models?

Thanks.

From my point of view $25K/month is not so much for this kind of blog and traffic associated. Selling yourself to one sponsor can't be the best monetarizing possibility - it's like killing your business and going back to salaried job.

Yes I think you are correct any sort of sponsorship always tends to sway the opinions of the pondered business/individual.

Although you wouldn't necessarily have a single company sponsor a more traditional magazine or newspaper, most do carry adverts from a variety of vendors. If you are concerned about editorial independence with regards a sponsored blog, then you should be equally concerned about the editorial independence of the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, New York Times or CNN.

My blog carries adverts, as does the rest of my magazine's website (www.cbronline.com). The point is that the advertising and editorial integrity question is not new, it's only new in the sense of its relation to blogs.

The only issue I see is that readers of the Gawker blog may not be aware that Sony is a big sponsor. With adverts on my (and others') blogs, the reader at least knows which vendors are backing the publication. The reader can then make up their own mind whether any bias is creeping in. If the reader doesn't know the sponsor, they can't make that judgement. So it comes down to transparency, in my view.

Yes thats true like someone mentioned above getting a sponshorship like that is just the same as working for someone else. There are loads of other ways one can monetize a site. The bias will come without any second thought

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