Earlier this week Shiny Media, whose subsidiary Shiny Trends part-owns Shiny Red, announced that it had secured £2.5 million worth of funding. It is the latest in a series of high profile investments in blog networks. At the end of last year B5 Media and PopSugar both secured large amounts of investment, while Glam, which offers a mixture of blog-based content and retail, took a hefty slice of second round investment.

The deals only serves to underline that blogs, especially those from independent companies, are now moving towards mainstream media. Even if the network owners consider their content to be way too edgy to share space with traditional newspapers and magazines, they are competing not just for eyeballs but for advertising budgets too.

Traditional media is also rushing to embrace blogs and social media. Take The Times, which this week unveiled its new website. Whereas once it positioned itself as The Thunderer delivering the news via tablets of stone to its readers, now it can’t get enough of user generated content and web 2.0 widgets.

It is clear that European blog networks like Shiny and Spain’s Weblogs SL and Italy’s Blogo, which have spent the last few years delivering exciting content that is somewhere between the news offered by tradtional media groups and the dynamic comment of blogs have not only helped shaped the new media landscape but are perfectly positioned to take their place in the mainstream.

Whether they can become as sucessful as magazine publishers like Future, Haymarket and Dennis remains to be seen, but it is clear they are here to stay.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 6th, 2007 at 3:04 pm by Gillian Crawshaw and is filed under PR and Marcomms, Print, User Generated Content, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.