Huffington Post launched a British version of the popular US site a year ago. The business model pushed by Arianna Huffington leaves bloggers who do all the writing unpaid. It is a successful model – AOL paid $315 million to buy the website and AOL keeps all the advertising revenue. Whereas MessageSpace happily shares the revenue with our bloggers, HuffPo doesn’t pay its bloggers a penny. Unsurprisingly HuffPo bloggers tried, unsuccessfully, to sue for back-payments when Arianna sold the site to AOL.

MessageSpace sells advertising on behalf of dozens of independent news and politics websites, allowing them to monetise their content without having to have their own sales operation. Every month we pay bloggers thousands of pounds. Quite simply MessageSpace financially supports the independent British blogosphere.

After 12 months of HuffPo operating in the UK we commissioned market research from Consumer Surveys to discover how familiar the general public were with blogs. They found that 61% of the public had never heard of the leading blogs, Huffington Post did have the highest name recognition (28.4%), followed by the Guido Fawkes Blog (10.0%), ConservativeHome (5.6%), LabourList (4.8%) and LibDem Voice (3.8%).

In market penetration terms there is clearly still a long way to go and plenty of opportunity to grow the British blogosphere.

This is how many of our industry rivals talk.

We speak English.

Now when corporations have a crisis they have to deal with more than just a Twitter storm. Video virals can hurt their reputation as well.

MessageSpace is helping the Russian Embassy in London to drive readers of political websites to the embassy’s website where they can learn about Russia’s foreign policy positions.

The public awareness-raising advertising campaign is running across leading political websites for two months, and aims to make extensive use of MessageSpace’s reach across the Web, especially to the general public interested in foreign policy.

The advert invites web visitors to click-through to the Russian Federation’s UK Embassy website

MessageSpace’s latest viral seeding initiative (on behalf of ActionAid) saw us scope out the web in South Africa, as ActionAid asked us to help promote the video and help send its message viral, during the period of the Durban Climate Conference.

We leveraged our network’s readership in South Africa, and augmented our efforts with a media buy on South African online publications to get traction for the video. As can be seen, it was quickly the most viewed video in the YouTube non-profit channel and the second most viewed video in South Africa. Be sure to check the video out – it’s a simple message: The UN Climate Conference in Durban needs to support women farmers in order to tackle the growing global food crisis, and agriculture is being increasingly threatened by climate change.

We leveraged the MessageSpace network’s readership in South Africa plus an online media buy in South Africa to push the video out. It became the most watched video on YouTube in South Africa on the non-profit channel and the second most viewed video in South Africa during the period of the conference.

If you are producing a campaign video, we can give it that extra push beyond what can be achieved by PR.

Call us to help your video go viral.

Mark Wallace, wit and leading Elvis revivalist, joins the MessageSpace blog network with his take on politics from an insider’s point of view. His Crash Bang Wallace blog has only been going for just over a year yet his blog was voted #18 in the Total Politics magazine blog awards. Well worth reading.

Douglas Carswell, the blogging MP for Clacton has joined the MessageSpace network of political, current affairs blogs and news sites.