It made big news across the blogosphere and on the national news when Mario Lavandeira, the Blogger behind PerezHilton.com, was slapped with a $7.6 million dollar lawsuit by X17 Inc. for copyright infringement. However, Lavandeira keeps plugging along unscathed posting celebrity gossip and seems to keep being rewarded, in a sense, by raking in the dough with media advertisements.
While a live music production company called Control Room pulled their ads off of the site last month, suddenly networks, such as The CW and Lifetime Networks according to Media Publications, are beginning to move in and place advertisements on the popular blog. Despite his controversial ways, PerezHilton.com still has impressive numbers when it comes to traffic with a whopping 15.6 million page views a week. With such a demand for juicy gossip, so is Lavandeira’s price tag for advertising on his blog, which I am always astonished by and that advertisers are willing to fork over.
PerezHilton.com utilizes BlogAds, as do I for my personal blogs, for garnering ads for his site. For a one-week ad placement, advertisers can expect to pay $800, $5000 and even $9000 depending on the ad placement they choose. Obviously the networks are not blinking at these dollar figures because they know that the traffic is there to get their ad seen by the appropriate target market.
While these are the prices that were in effect even before the multi-million dollar lawsuit was imposed, I have to wonder how much of that money now goes into Lavandeira’s pocket and how much now goes to his lawyer.
While I in no way condone stealing images for a blogging business model, reporting on what is going on in the blogosphere in regards to lawsuits, such as that with Perez Hilton, creates a better understanding and clarity among boundaries and limits that Bloggers are allowed (or not allowed) to cross.
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