Businesses are turning to blogs and away from traditional publishers

InformationWeek as an interesting article about how businesses are going to places like Yahoo and Google to pick up needed information and away from traditional segment leaders–newspaper companies and business trade publishers.

‘News and trade services are two of the most severely impacted markets hit by the dynamo that is the search world,’ says Chuck Richard, VP and lead analyst at Outsell, a research and advisory firm.

Revenue for the news and trade market reached $89.5 billion in 2004, up 8.7% from 2003. Outsell predicts growth of perhaps half that in 2005.

While the segment should continue to expand, Outsell’s Market View report finds that individual user spending on B-to-B content between 2001 and 2005 fell 15%. ‘Users are finding alternatives to paid N&T [news and trade] sources: mostly ad-supported content and user-created content from blogs‘.

This is great news for law firms. Large law firms have great content in the form of articles, newsletters and e-alerts. Problem is it’s buried in Web sites or not on Web sites at all. When the content is on Web sites, the page it’s on is not set up to be indexed properly for the search engines. The result: business clients looking for information cannot find your stuff.

Blogs are an easy solution. It’s easy to publish content and the content gets indexed and optimized for the search engines.