The Mike Abundo Effect

Philippine portal Yehey plans to launch a blog network in two months. Here’s what I’ve gathered from Yehey Business Development Officer Iggy Javellana:

• Yehey’s bloggers will be experts on various Philippine niches. They include filmmaker Quark Henares and gamer Alodia Gosiengfiao (as earlier reported). Around forty niche experts have been approached so far.
• Yehey’s bloggers will be required to post at least twice per week.
• Yehey’s bloggers will receive a base pay, plus ad revenue shares.
• Yehey’s blogs will probably not be on the Yehey.com domain.
• Yehey’s blogs will use high-end blogging software, probably WordPress.
• Iggy will provide basic training for Yehey’s bloggers — how to avoid libel and copyright issues, etc.
• All plans for Yehey’s blogs will be finalized within two weeks. Development timeframe is six weeks after that.

Eventually, Iggy hopes to provide blogs for all Yehey users. In the future, Yehey users who accumulate a lot of traffic to their blogs will then get a shot at revenue-sharing, a la YouTube’s partner program.

Contrary to the popular notion that Philippine advertisers are hesitant to appear on blogs, Iggy says Yehey’s advertisers actually want this to happen. He says Yehey’s been wanting to do this since 2004; now that Filipinos are finally catching up to the medium, it’s about time for this to happen.

Blog networks are a thriving business — from Weblogs Inc. in the US to b5media in Canada to Bayanihan in the Philippines — so Yehey could really make this work. It will be very interesting to see casual bloggers like Quark and Alodia evolve into probloggers.

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