The British blogosphere had an ripple of excitement last week with the launch of Messy Media‘s first offering – Westmonster.

In interview with Journalism.co.uk developers Lloyd Shepherd and Andrew Levy talked about their strategy for launching, what they hope, will be a relatively small number of ‘high quality’ blogs ‘that appeal to a mass audience’.

And up their sleeves? A worker-centric blog about the City, blogs on motoring and journalism, as well as a celebrity title written for ‘people with a brain’.

They want big audience, US style (and bigger advertising returns – no doubt?). Can it work like that? They say they want to win the audience with ‘quality’ rather than quantity.

But can a popular, eyeball-heavy blog just be quality without the quantity?

Ashley Norris, co-founder of Shiny Media, told Journalism.co.uk that Shiny was a ‘mini content factory‘ continually producing a mix of content – news, opinion, and extra background material – in a bid to keep readers coming back to the site, again and again, during the day.

And it’s a strategy he thinks has still got legs, saying there is still huge potential to launch niche blogs in the UK, building large audiences through multiple publications, as more and more leisure pursuits find an outlet on the web.

“There is a massive opportunity, part of me thinks that at the moment we should just continue to churn out blog after blog after blog in different verticals, because virtually every time we have done it, after a time it has reached a point where it’s getting a significant amount of UK traffic and interest from UK advertisers.”