OPEN

While debates rage on about the monetisation of social media through advertising and aggregators, the big bucks today lie in helping big companies understand what the hell is going on in blogs and social media.

In the US this market worth a mint already: earlier this year CNET reported that Buzzmetrics clients pay from US$ 30,000 to half a million dollars a year.

Two of the big players in analysing and monitoring blogs, Buzzmetrics and Intelliseek, were bought and merged by VNU today (here’s the release, go ahead and correct me on the minutiae). Naturally they blogged their hearts out about it immediately (here and here).

This is an important move for VNU’s research firm AC Nielsen (the bit of VNU that owned Buzzmetrics, keep up…).

Jeff Jarvis at Buzzmachine rightly sees it as evidence of the growing value to advertisers of the intelligence that can be sifted from the 25 million blogs out there in the world:

To
me, this means that measuring blogs and distributed media will matter more and
more to advertisers and there will be a growing market for such analytics. It
also is another indication of the big changes coming to the mix of ad dollars.
Yes, we are ready for prime time.

Expect to see rivals launch new services or buy competency in this space soon. Question is: who to buy. There’s Umbria, Onalytica in the UK, and ASOMO in Spain. Can’t think of any others – please do comment or mail me if you know of any.

: : A new word for your Web 2.0 buzzword bingo games, keep an eye out for "blog mining". It’s a filthy word, but it’s hot this week.

UPDATE:  K D Paine reminds me that there’s Cymfony in this space and talks about another research firm that I’d not heard of Biz 360.