In what could be a watershed moment for blogs, the hilarious and fantastically popular Boing Boing is appealing to readers for ideas about revenue models. It seems that the site is growing in traffic so fast that its bandwidth costs are threatening to bankrupt it.

What a great problem to have. They've so far made the wise step of asking their friend John Battelle for ideas, he who co-founded Wired and founded Industry Standard. Here's what I advised:

1) Micropayments. The key to charging for content is DON'T charge for everything, just charge for some percentage (10%; 1%, for example) of premium content.

2) "Recommended donation." Like a museum. People can give nothing if they like, but suggest what they should donate. Keep track. Make them register for more than the most basic form of content. Then cookie them and keep a running tally of what they owe. Say, 1 penny per page view. After they've viewed 50 or 100 or 500 pages, remind them politely (e.g., with a page intercept, a flashing notice in the corner, an email) that they are obviously a regular reader and you ask your regular readers for a donation. Sure, many, or perhaps most, will ignore it, but in all likelihood a significant percentage will give something. Some will give what you ask, some will give less, some more. In any event, you'll earn more than you earn now.

3) BlogAds. I wrote a piece that came out this week for iMedia about blogs and their revenue potential. I mentioned how BlogAds has finally come into its own. By my estimates, DailyKoz is earning about $3,400 per week from BlogAds (or it was, anyway, until its recently political snafus that have cost it some ads).

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