Blog Advertising

WSJ reported Well-placed blog ads can boost a company's image as cutting-edge. Plus, they're inexpensive: $350 a week, for instance, for premium positioning on Nick Denton (Gawker's founder) high-profile inside-Washington blog, Wonkette, which got 2.2 million "page views" last month, a measure of how many times a single visitor looks at one Web site page.

But many companies are wary of putting their brand on such a new and unpredictable medium. Most blogs are written by a lone author. They are typically unedited and include spirited responses from readers who can post comments at will. Some marketers fear blogs will criticize their products or ad campaigns. And, like all new blog readers, companies are just learning how to track what's being said on blogs and which ones might make a good fit for their ads....

The vast majority of the 8 million or so blogs currently in existence have few if any ads. Many are run by hobbyists or armchair commentators, some of whom sign up to carry tiny text ads from a large pool of advertisers through a service from Google Inc. The ads generate revenue only when a visitor clicks on the ad. Most bloggers, like Ronni Bennett, a former television producer who lives in New York's Greenwich Village and writes about aging on TimeGoesBy.net, can't even offset the cost of her Internet access. Her site gets between 1,200 and 1,500 page views a day, bringing in all of $50 since December 2004.

Ideoblog blogs Maybe the big problem is that blogging is still too “unpredictable,” and that advertisers will come around when the risks look more manageable. Then, of course, advertisers will sort according to market niches. A nice thing about blogging is that it permits micromarketing, as I discuss here. There might also be sorting between the “cable” approach of no-advertising blogs (like mine) and the “broadcast” approach of advertising blogs.

BlogAds did a survey, and if you are interested in Blog Advertising, you should check it out.

There can be dangers in accepting blog advertisements. Initially Captain's Quarters thought that Google had dropped his blog from their search engine, but later SayAnything revealed that he had been fooled into accepting $300 a month for the use of a subdomain off of his “sayanythingblog.com” domain. He would point the subdomain to a page of advertising hosted on their servers and they’d send him the money via Pay Pal. He checked out the advertising and there was no porn or anything involved so he agreed. Seemed like a good deal to him and with hosting costs rising as his page gets more and more popular he was not much inclined to turn down opportunities to make money from this page.

Turns out this was a mistake. This company is involved in something called link farming, a practice Google frowns upon. They frown upon it so much, in fact, that Say Anything has now been removed from that search engine’s indexes.

As NetMechanic said A link farm consists of sites that link to other sites for the sole purpose of increasing their link popularity score. Unlike perfectly valid links to sites with related information, sites that participate in link farming contain links to totally unrelated sites. This practice is also referred to as link stuffing.

Google hates link farms and labels the links they generate as spam. In fact, Google gates them so much that some sites get removed from the index if they're affiliated with link farms. Spooked, some webmasters are considering removing all outbound links from their sites.

That's an overreaction that decreases the site value to visitors and hurts the Web in general because cross-linking is a basic tenet of the Internet. Links are fine - even encouraged - if they are related to your topic, but link farms rarely provide useful content to visitors.

Coinciding almost exactly with SayAnything's removal from Google was an email from Business Barn stating that they were ending the arrangement together. Which makes perfect sense. They were after his Google page rank. Now that he have no Google page rank his blog is of no use to them.

The strange thing is that as likwidshoe commented If you got delinked from Google because of this episode, ask them why the company in question is still linked

GoogleGuy said Hi, I can confirm that it was spammy urls like .... that led to this spam penalty triggering for your site–and it looks like there were links from your main site to this info subdomain. It looks like these urls have been removed or the DNS has been updated for info.sayanythingblog.com, so I’d expect your site to return into Google index quite quickly (probably within 1-2 days).

PowerPundit was targeted by the same scam, but they did not agree to it, because when they checked there were links to porno sites. The advertiser removed the links, but fortunately PP did not fall for the offer.

Blog Ads can bring in revenue to offset hosting fees, but a blogger needs to be very careful what sort of ads they accept. One alternative would be Google AdSense, however it's payout depends on the uniqueness of the material on a blog (or on a website). For example, if you are the only one with a blog (or webpage) on a particular subject, and if there are advertisers that want to reach people interested in that subject, they may pay a lot per click with AdSense, but if there are thousands of blogs (or webpages) covering a subject, the amount per click paid by AdSense is much much lower. For example one day I had 116 people see a particular page, and 1 person clicked on it, and I earned 3 cents, but another page had 71 page views, and 1 click through, and I earned 43 cents. I have a friend that reported that his site (which is much rarer than mine, sometimes earns $1.00 or more per click through

Update 3/28 9:26 CQ said I received an e-mail from Business Barn ending our current relationship -- perhaps because my Google ranking disappeared overnight -- but offering me a new deal with free hosting and unlimited bandwidth. I have turned it down and deleted the subdomains that caused the problems with the Google search engine. I also replied to the comment that Google left on my original post explaining what happened -- and they were kind enough to send this response: "Thanks for letting us know; I'd expect captainsquartersblog.com to come fully back into the index within 1-2 days."

So just to make sure everyone knows, Google didn't delete CQ from their search engines for political reasons, and they've actually been very good about letting me know what the problem was and responsive to my solution. I'll be looking forward to visitors from Google searches later this week ...