Blogging fragmented audiences beyond older demographic marketing categories

Evidence

Consequently, audiences were fragmented to a degree that made cable television look like the days of The Ed Sullivan Show. The regular follower of, say, the blogger Andrew Sullivan would have to be interested in a pro-war gay conservative viewpoint that also advocated for Catholicism, marijuana, beards, beagles, and same-sex marriage. Readers of Boing Boing or Slashdot were people whose truest affiliation was to a neo-geek mentality that celebrated eccentricity and arcane obsessions. Such groups were nothing like the clear demographic categories of old, or even the relatively precise PRIZM clusters. In fact, bloggers sometimes claimed they were creating a-geographical communities, aggregations purely by common interest and passion. And since bloggers had, at least initially, no expectation of making money, there was no temptation to compromise their standards or temper their opinions. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 910

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the PRIZM cluster marketing system discussed in earlier attention-industry history chapters, positioning blogs as its breakdown. — connects to: Attention industries both react to and actively create audience fragmentation — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 617; Psychographic segmentation broke mass-audience advertising by enabling message personalization — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 611
• DEEPTHINKING: The observation that non-commercial blogging initially removed the incentive to temper opinions — and the implied causal reversal that follows when monetization arrives — is a dense, paradigm-level insight about attention economics.

Broader Connections

• Attention industries both react to and actively create audience fragmentation #expands (0.80) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 617
• Psychographic segmentation broke mass-audience advertising by enabling message personalization #contradicts (0.75) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 611