And so another attempt to make money out of someone blathering on about politics has failed, with the closure of Westmonster.

I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so…

Note to any other wannabe online publishers thinking of starting a UK politics blog: don’t bother. The audience figures even for the biggest aren’t sufficiently high (certainly in terms of uniques) to warrant any advertiser forking out anywhere near enough money to make such ventures profitable. The only way to make money via British blogging is adapting the long tail model, stealing some ideas out of AdSense’s book, and setting up an advertising platform across numerous blogs. Only Blogads has already done that – and the UK version, MessageSpace, is backed by some of those self-same big boys of the UK blog world.

Or, of course, you could lobby for funding and sponsorship – seems to work for places like EurActiv, that’d never (that I can see) be able to survive on advertising revenue alone. But the thing to remember is this: if newspapers only had political news in them, they’d swiftly go bankrupt.