The vast majority of bloggers still write for free. For most, the satisfaction of publishing their thoughts and interacting with readers is reward enough. But an increasing number want at least a small return for their efforts — the question is how?
There are many routes, from affiliate programs like Amazon Associates and Commission Junction to cost-per-click text ads like Google AdSense. If a blogger wants to sell advertising space on their weblog they can use services like AdBrite, which will handle serving, billing and sales.
But what if a blogger wants to actively attract companies who might otherwise not even know their weblog exists? It’s easy for established blogs like BoingBoing or Daily Kos, who already have a significant Web presence. But how does Joe Blogger get noticed? The answer appears to be the collective.
Join up!
Gawker Media, Weblogs, Inc. and B5 Media have proved that there is a market for advertising on blog networks. And the launch of Pajamas Media last month and the increasing success of Blogads appears to herald a new way for individual bloggers to become part of such a collective advertising network while still retaining control of their individual site’s content. By joining together in loose or more rigid groups, bloggers are beginning to appear on the radar of big business and advertising companies and present themselves in terms that big firms can finally understand.
According to Forrester Research, a company that analyzes technology’s impact on business and consumers, between $50 and $100 million will have been spent on blog advertising this year. That could be overly optimistic according to Henry Copeland, the founder of Blogads. He says that the market for pure blog advertising is more likely between $10 and $20 million. But whatever the true figure, it is tiny in comparison to advertising spending in newspapers last year, which according to preliminary estimates by the Newspaper Association of America, was $49 billion.
Nevertheless, interest in blog advertising is growing rapidly. Early this year Volvo announced it would sponsor Microsoft blog platform MSN Spaces, and Audi paid for 70 million impressions on 286 weblogs for its latest A3 hatchback campaign. Most recently, Budget Rent A Car paid for a string of ads on blogs for its Up Your Budget campaign. And where did Audi and Budget go to find the blogs they advertised on? In Audi’s case Blogads supplied 283 of the 286 blogs, and in Budget’s case Blogads supplied 175 of the 177 blogs — many of them sites that would likely never have gotten a look from ad firms if they had not been suggested by Blogads [Full disclosure: I am a Blogads member and my own blog was included in the Budget campaign].
BL Ochman is the blog and Internet strategy consultant who was responsible for Budget’s weblog ad buy. Ochman said that her job was made a lot easier when she could go to one company and be presented with a menu of sites that would be suitable for the campaign. Blogads does that by matching advertisers to weblogs based upon page impressions and subject matter.
“It would take forever if I had to go looking for the blogs myself,” said Ochman. “But Henry [Copeland] knows more blogs than anyone else because that’s his business, and he could give me a rundown on blogs that I wasn’t familiar with. Obviously I had to look at them all to make sure they were brand appropriate, but it was a lot better than using individual search engines, especially considering all of the different search engines return different results and rankings.”
Ochman said that although most big businesses are initially hesitant about advertising on weblogs, perceptions are slowly changing — especially as blog advertising starts to outperform traditional advertising. She said that a traditional ad campaign is deemed successful if the response rate is 0.5 percent feedback. Budget’s Blogads campaign was 17 times that — with an 8.5 percent click through rate, Ochman said. It even outperformed other online campaigns with AOL Instant Messenger and Google keywords. However, Ochman said that some companies are still worried about brand identity in the wild, unregulated blogosphere.
And perhaps it is here that Pajamas Media comes in: where better for a big brand to go than to another brand? [Full disclosure: I am on the Pajamas Media blogroll although I am not a PJ Blogger.] Pajamas Media was co-founded by Charles Johnson, of Little Green Footballs, and author and screenwriter Roger L. Simon with $3.5 million of venture capital. It comprises about 80 mostly conservative blogs.
Simon is already trying to combat the right-wing label, along with the myriad other criticisms that have been leveled at the company since it launched on Nov. 16. A chorus of bloggers has questioned what exactly Pajamas Media is. Simon explains that the company is an attempt to build a blog content service that provides online news and opinion in the same way that the Associated Press provides reports to other news outlets.
In all the fracas over Pajamas, one thing the company’s detractors seem to have overlooked is that it is the first network of its kind to bring bloggers together and to pay them to produce content on their own site. Every blog member of Pajamas Media that has high enough traffic rankings is paid a set monthly fee. Although Simon would not divulge the payment amount, he said that it varied widely and that higher trafficked blogs would be paid more than lower trafficked blogs. In return, Pajamas is able to post its ads on a blog network that it believes is still undervalued real estate. Nielsen research on Simon’s own weblog showed that his readers were in the six-figure income bracket, were college graduates and early adopters. Pajamas has enlisted Nielsen to prove the same across the entire Pajamas network.
“The blogosphere is like the Pacific Ocean; no one knows where it’s going,” says Simon. “Maybe only one or two of these models will work, or maybe all of them will. It will be interesting to see.”
Easier for bloggers and advertisers
Grouping publications together for the sake of advertising, as bloggers seem to be doing, is an established formula. Steve Hall, founder and publisher of Adrants, says newspapers and magazines have been doing the same for a long time. Bloggers, says Hall, were initially slow to adopt the idea because early weblogs had an aversion to the commercialism of advertising.
Hall’s own weblog is part of a small and extremely loose network that includes Defense Industry Daily, MarketingVOX and Media Buyer Planner, all of which are represented by the same company, Laredo Group. It’s a simple way of taking the business of selling advertising space out of his hands so that he can concentrate on writing. After all, selling and supporting advertising is a full-time job.
According to Jason Calacanis, the CEO of Weblogs, Inc., it is impossible to deal with advertising and constantly maintain a weblog. Calacanis sold his network of more than 80 niche weblogs to AOL for $25 million in October. He said that grouping weblogs together also made life a lot easier for advertisers.
“Advertisers love blogs, that’s true,” Calacanis says. “However, they can’t do an ad buy with 13,987 blogs with 10,000 monthly page views each. They would much rather do one buy across two to 10 trusted blogs. Most advertisers and their agencies are not designed to do advertising buys under 500,000 pages.”
And that is where Blogads comes back in. The company currently sells space on 900 blogs, evangelizing and negotiating on their behalf, and working with about 600 advertisers a month. Blogads serves as a single location for advertisers to manage and monitor ads. It also advises companies which weblogs best suit their needs. For bloggers it offers a storefront and takes away the administrative and accounting hassle.
Bloggers set their own prices for a week, a month or a three-month period. They can reject advertisers they do not approve of and they can start or join one of a growing number of mini networks such as liberal blogs, food blogs or evangelical blogs — groups that would be of great interest to certain advertisers. It’s a platform which Copeland thinks could support a number of niche markets, most notably customizable T-shirts.
“Though some folks think this example is trivial or demeaning to blogging, I’m convinced that the T-shirt peddlers are a precursor for an important new trajectory in online commerce,” says Copeland. “They cater to a new sensibility in fashion — folks who want stuff tailored closely to their personalities, stuff that you can’t buy in the Gap, stuff that is topical and generated by people like them.
“I think the blogosphere will help other companies tap into something we might call ‘identity commerce.’ We’ve seen things like Gitmo cookbooks, Christian web hosting, customized tools for knitting geeks, baby gear,” says Copeland.
When Blogads launched in August 2002, it didn’t sell an ad for three weeks. Copeland would not divulge the company’s current figures, but he did say that revenues for 2005 would be three times 2004, which was itself 100 times greater 2003.
“I thought we’d be swamped with buyers and sellers on day one. We were so convinced this was going to rocket,” says Copeland. “But bloggers said ‘Huh? Make money from my blog? That’s a personal space.’ We might as well have been asking people to tattoo their foreheads. And advertisers thought bloggers were weirdoes and teenagers, so who would want to buy from them? It wasn’t until early 2004 that it became obvious this was a viable business.”
In a May 2002 blog entry, Copeland made a $1,000 wager that by May 2007 there would be more Blogads than NYTimes.com classified ads or that NYTimes.com would be using Blogads. That prediction may not come to pass, but Copeland says if he could extend that deadline by two years, he would be happy.
About Paul Berger
Hmmm. Berger admits to us that two of the entities he’s touting here he has a relationship with (one financial & the other unspecified). At least me acknowledged it. But it makes my impression of everything he wrote about those 2 companies less favorable.
He also understates by half the absolute chaos, indecision & nincompoop activities that have characterized Pamajams Media since its inception. Also, it remains to be seen whether PJM is a viable proposition. I even read at one blog that there’s a betting pool on the date of its demise. So let’s wait a bit before we use PJM as a model for anything.
As for Blogads, it seems like a great service. But I believe it has a minimum daily traffic requirement of 1,100 unqiue visitors. I’ve wanted to affilate w. Blogads for some time but they have no interest in sites like mine (500 unique visitors/day). That leaves me & other bloggers like me out in the cold.
If I may continue on the Pajamas Media game. From this comment in the article: “one thing the company’s detractors seem to have overlooked is that it is the first network of its kind to bring bloggers together and to pay them to produce content on their own site.”
Didn’t Weblogsinc do that? And one of the detractors indeed had helped devise that plan– his name is Kenton Kelley, who has blogged as Dennis the Peasant.
His revelations about his early dealings with the Pajamas Media folks have been impishly scathing, and also very educational.
Two things I learned that I never picked up through most of the new media boosters:
1. The *hard* political magazines– and that includes the Sunday morning talking– shows have never made money; they are all underwritten by corporate parents or vanity patrons. Now, there’s a thinking that online media has much lower cost of production, as well as a talent pool willing to work for less, and an audience with lower demands; that remains to be seen whether it will be sustainable. Kelley also offered the straight dope from an ad exec: the explanation is simply that the male viewer of political media is not the main purchaser in the household. Niche trade magazines (cf. Weblogsinc) have a much stronger advertiser appeal.
2. How can alert media observers see if there’s enough synergy going on? Kelley explains a simple test. If a syndicate is using plain ol’ BlogAds, well, then the individuals bloggers are hardly doing any better than they would on their own. If the ads are for other blogs or political candidates, that’s very little outside money injected into the market.
The ultimate irony is that the natural evolution of blog synergy is towards working together, assigning stories, editing copy– in other words, a magazine. For all of the “it’s just like the pamphlateers of the 18th century!” crowd, you have to keep in mind, that those pamphleteers themselves evolved to the organized media of today.