…Umm. Guys? A number of indie bloggers already make more each month than you make. And their year-over-year growth trajectory is a lot greater than yours. And they don’t have to worry what the boss thinks. And they’ve each got a brand name people adore. And they’ve got the lowest overheads in the publishing industry. Who do people want to work for — your failing industry, or themselves?

Allow me a prediction: indie bloggers are going to kick corporate ass.

…If you think publishing has been transformed, don’t you think that its twin sister advertising is also being turned inside out? While traditional advertising is about megaphones and cheerleading, blog advertising is about conversing, listening as much as you talk. Think that the 20-management-tier command-and-control structure of conventional advertisers is going to be comfortable with crawling into this bee-hive?

Scale? Who has more scale than the blogosphere?

Relationships with advertisers? (Remember the “relationships” that buggy makers used to have with their customers?)

To take on bloggers, large publishing corporations (themselves slowly collapsing) will have to re-allign their cost structures, organograms, sales channels and mentalities.

Worst of all, they are going to have to cannibalize their own sales. They won’t do it.

It is not just publishing that is changing. Corporate publishers are going to have to change their relationships with advertisers. Heck, advertisers are going to have to change their relationship with advertising.

…In entrepreneurship, there’s a constant and healthy tension between dreaming about the next decade and focusing on today’s nitty gritty. The advantage bloggers (and their vendors) have over traditional publishers is that they ARE the users and the lag time between idea and execution is weeks rather than years. And the feedback loop is measured in minutes rather than years. So the innovation cycle is exponentially faster. As regular readers of this blog know, I don’t envy the corporate publishing incumbents (emphasis mine).

Business Week predicts corporate takeover of blogs