Disclaimer: I doubt very much that this post will be of any interest to those bloggers out there who blog for the self-professed joy of blogging itself, or to any blogger who feels that advertising has no place on blogs, or to bloggers who think it’s okay for their content to be used elsewhere without askance. If this is the case then you might want to hit the old ‘J’ key and carry on with some other post.
When blogging first started out it was in most cases just a personal experience of posting one’s thoughts about any number of subjects. Then some bloggers realized that by adding advertising to a section of their blogs they could cover the cost of maintaining the blog and make a few extra bucks in the process. Typically this form of advertising was Google AdSense because at that time it was pretty well the only option open to the great unwashed masses.
Then some very bright people released that blogs if properly marketed could be real money makers – especially if you grouped a bunch of them under the same company masthead but covering slightly different subjects. Thus were born the blogging networks and for them the advertising game changed because they were no longer reliant on Google to feed their growing bank accounts. In these cases ad networks came looking for them and deals were struck making everyone but the average blogger able to sit back and count the bucks that were rolling in on the back of ever increasing page views.
As the financial profits grew top heavy the average blogger 
who wanted to make themselves a living at something they really liked doing found that they were left with Google AdSense as the only reliable source of income. Sure there where other ad networks or affiliate type schemes that came along; and while some smacked more of electronic pyramid schemes others depended on where one’s person ethics stood. The only other real choice that bloggers had was to try and walk the advertising minefield by themselves which meant they had to understand a whole bunch of esoteric terms like page views, PPC, PPA, impressions and eCPM.
In the end Google AdSense has become the mainstay of probably 90% of the average blogs that have advertising and Google has made it more than plain that you play by their rules or you just don’t play at all. This was all fine and even though Google controlled the dominant portion of the blog advertising space we toed the line and collected our pittance each month as long as we met the AdSense requirements.
This of course has nothing to do with those blogs whose whole purpose was to make money via AdSense by telling the gullible masses on how to make small fortunes online using the Google monster. No .. this is all about those bloggers who play by the rules but who have to put up with the AdSense splogs that lived on Google sponsored free blog networks. This is about the bloggers who just want to earn a living in a blogosphere that has become increasingly difficult to earn a living because if you are not a part of the top tier you are just fodder for other’s to make money from.
At first is wasn’t so bad as people had to come to your blog in order to read about your opinions on things that they equally cared about; but in the process you were making a few bucks because those Google Ads were being seen. Then along came RSS feeds which made it easier for your readers to get that content without having to actually go to your blog and at the time much was said about the loss of income because those ads were no longer being seen. Some folks fought back by only publishing partial feeds of each posts so that if you want the whole story you had to go to the particular blog at which point the ads were served and you made your pennies for the day.
But people; and a lot of blog owners disagreed with the whole idea of partial feeds and were willing to forego the ad dollars so that their readers would keep coming back. Then this ad 
dollar loss was slightly evened out when it became possible for ads to be added to the RSS feeds. This balanced things out for awhile but then along came things like social networks and all types of feed aggregators that once again took the blogger’s content and put it into other peoples hands – so once more our potential for making a living at doing what we loved best was being impacted by forces which we couldn’t control. Then on top of this there was a general attitude developing that so what if your income was being impacted. The fact that you wanted to make a few dollars from your writing wasn’t as important as other people being able to do what they want with your hard work.
While this part is equally important it is a subject for a later post as what I want to talk more about at this point is how those career bloggers who want to have productive advertising on their blogs can best achieve this without having to sell their soul or ethics in order to do so.
Recently I had an interesting email discussion with a Googler involved with AdSense which happened because she believed that I would give my honest appraisal of AdSense and how it works for small time bloggers such as myself. As she noted in her email ….“you as a blogger have no control over the quality of advertisers and many times the relevance is a joke.” She finished of the email with what I consider to be one of the most telling of Google’s attitude towards non top tier bloggers … “Internally, people (I’ve talked to) aren’t seeing blogs as ‘social media’”
A lot of folks would say that why bother with AdSense then just use any of the other ad networks that are out there. Well the fact of the matter is that it doesn’t matter which ad network you join and spend hours managing they are all based on page views in one manner or another. They all require that people come to your site and either view the ad, click on the ad or perform some action after clicking on the ad.
It is getting the eyes to your blog that is the all important key regardless of the network which is why we have such a proliferation of me-too type blogs that just rehash the news from the top tier boys along with properly placed links to hopefully get readers of the main blogs decide to check out what other people are saying – which in the majority of cases is 
nothing more than a quote with maybe a snippet of text – yet surrounded by AdSense ads.
As irritating as this might be chances are these types of blogs are making a better living than those blogs that don’t act as bottom feeders of the top tier leftovers. For blogs that try hard to be original thought providers and bring something of value to the table they find themselves increasingly difficult to make a living because they don’t play the link bait game that would otherwise bring the much needed traffic to their blogs.
It goes without saying that the majority of hard working career bloggers need a better way to be able to monetize their efforts but the fact is that no-one out there in the advertising world considers low page view bloggers who continually bring new thoughts and ideas to the blogosphere to be worth the effort. There is too much money to be made from the top tier blogs and the splogs that pollute the blogosphere.
While there are no sure fired answers for the fact that it takes page views in order to make any money for your efforts and validate your choice in a career there are some alternatives that I have found that do in fact try to provide some tools to level the field if only slightly. Primarily among them is a new service that is still in beta called the Rubicon Project which I would equate as being an ad broker who uses the collective power of all the blogs under its roof in order to get better deals from the 64 different ad networks it does business with.
Rubicon Project might not be a complete solution but I know myself that since being lucky enough to get in on the beta I have seen better results from the ads that they serve up on the site. I will be doing a more in depth look at them at a later point.
Along with Rubicon there is also another network called Project Wonderful and they work on an entirely different methodology of serving ads up on your site and while their way of serving up ads will not make you extremely wealthy they do give you the power over what is displayed and how much you think that particular ad spot is worth. It is from this point that advertisers that are a part of the Project Wonderful network start bidding for those available spots.
But really these are just variations on the typical ad network philosophy that you need the eyeballs in continually growing numbers in order to make any decent money. While ad networks rely on the page view count in order to decide whether they want to do business with you there is never any value placed on the fact that you might only have a 1,000 visitors that come by everyday to read what you are writing. Just as they won’t taking into account that you have a few thousand RSS readers who faithfully pull your feed everyday to read what you write.
Unfortunately until advertisers realize that there is potentially more value for their dollars if spread across the broader spectrum of B-List size blogs we will fine ourselves forever locked between the shysters and a Google AdSense program that doesn’t even see us as anything to be interested in because “we aren’t a social media”.
I'm not sure exactly what you'e suggesting. Is it highr CPMs for B-List blogs?
I don't think it unthinkable that such a thing will happen, but the problem is, the M in CPM is still based on traffic, no matter what you do.
There are networks springing up all the time. We're starting to experiment with a company here in San Francisco who claims it will pay us more than AdSense and some of that (they say) is because the specific focus of our site is more valuable to advertisers. We're very small (~350,000 page views/mo) so even if we got a $10 CPM (we won't, it will surely be less) it's still in the realm of pocket money (especially split betwen 2 people). But if it's more pocket money than AdSense, that's at least a step in the right direction.
No matter what happens though, to make a good living off of it, more scale must be achieved. I'm guessing whatever happens with advertising there will be one “who get paid well” for like every 1000-10000 who don't.
If it's about the money, scale matters.regardless of how the advertising works.
Robert
I'm not sure I was really trying to suggest anything. It was just more of a rambling that when it comes to the mid-size blogs the only ones making any money are the ad networks and yet the bloggers still have to try and do something to even just pay for their costs.
brilliant post. there also needs to be a focus on rss monetization in a real way, as well as sponsorship not tied to CPMs but engagement and audience value. we should bring this up as a topic this for weekend's show.
Personally I would really like to see sponsorship in the smaller blogs become a norm .. I know I would trade any one of the current ads for a set rate sponsorship ad in the same spot that was negotiated every 3 or 6 months depending on the type of blog and it growth pattern.
There is plenty of money in blogging, and Ads in RSS don't pay because they don't work. I will do over $150k on my blog posts this year, and stack on top of that for consulting services that will be mostly found through people who read one of my postings.
There is more competition than there used to be, and if you can't step up to the plate, then you may not be in the right game.
Full thoughts…
http://www.takingthebridge.com/2008/04/response…
Personally I would really like to see sponsorship in the smaller blogs become a norm .. I know I would trade any one of the current ads for a set rate sponsorship ad in the same spot that was negotiated every 3 or 6 months depending on the type of blog and it growth pattern.
I think more bloggers need to get off the “drop code in and have it pay me automatically” bandwagon. If you want to make more money with your blog (or website, or company, or whatever) then you have to get off your butt and make it happen. If you want to make more money from advertising then research your industry and sell directly to companies. Reach out and develop relationships with potential advertisers and make them understand how you'll be providing value. Sending emails is a low-effort activity so if you get in touch with a dozen companies and one of them ends up buying ads on your site, it's well worth the effort.
Even with out doing this, it is about knowing which topics you are an expert in, and worth reading about, and putting in the leg work to keep that up. There are a million arm chair quarterbacks, and everyone of them thinks they are worth reading, but they aren't.
One must pay their dues, hit the trade shows, speak at conventions, become recognized as a leader in their space, or they are just another guy with a rant log.
I think that widgets should bring in new revenues, See on my blog http://blog.quintura.com
Mike I agree with you whole heartedly but this is a territory that I believe most bloggers have no idea on how to proceed .. how to best figure what that 125 x 125 ad above the fold it worth or how much of a flat rate to charge for the 160 x 600 Tower ad. They don't know how much bickering room there is or if companies are even interested in doing a flat rate sponsorship type deal.
For many bloggers the idea of having to be sales agents when their inclination is just to write about products, news or other such things is not something they are prepared to handle and so they end up settling for second best and getting screwed in the process.
[...] Hodson at win extra wrote about how advertising for bloggers has to change… Well Steve if you can’t take the heat, get a real job. The problem is not [...]
I think that widgets should bring in new revenues, See on my blog http://blog.quintura.com
Steve,
Great post. You've nailed three big issues:
1. Top-quality, original content doesn't usually mean lots of traffic
2. As it current stands, pageviews are still the king of online advertising – no pageviews, no advertising.
3. The AdSense revenue share is unfair but Google's not going to change the rules any time soon, and the viable alternatives are few and far between.
My experience with markevanstech.com mirrors your post to a tee. It gets lots of traffic through RSS readers but only a modest amount of pageviews, which means it's not a great advertising vehicle. If I was really into getting more ad revenue, a return to partial feeds would be something I'd consider. People may not like them but if the content is good, maybe they would click through to the blog.
Mark
great post.
In an age where everyone is a superstar, it seems everyone also needs an agent.
(Seems like a via business for those so inclined…)
Steve,
Have you tried the ADSDAQ Exchange? Publishers can name their own CPM price and thereby receive control on yield that publishers don't get from AdSense and others.
John
great post.
In an age where everyone is a superstar, it seems everyone also needs an agent.
(Seems like a via business for those so inclined…)
Thanks for the support of the intent of the post and as much as I understand the reasoning that you would consider switching back to partial feeds this isn't one that I would ever do myself as I strong disagree with them to the point that if I find a blog uses partial feeds I will unsubscribe from them. At this point there is only one blog that I have bent that rule for but it is a contest each time a new post shows up via RSS not to unsubscribe from them.
Never heard of the service before John so perhaps some further information to share with the group would be nice
Never heard of the service before John so perhaps some further information to share with the group would be nice
The newest thing I think also is selling blog advertising through auctions such as theblogauction.com . It is new, but I think it will become very successful
The newest thing I think also is selling blog advertising through auctions such as theblogauction.com . It is new, but I think it will become very successful
[...] living out of his passion. I recommend reading a very thoughtful, personal, honest post written by Steven Hodson on that [...]
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[...] those interested in making money even to cover monthly costs such as hosting. (Hat tip to Steve Hodson, who wote an excellent post yesterday, and Deep Jive Interests, who accurately described [...]
[...] Steve Hodson (correctly) says that advertising for bloggers has to [...]
[...] that the blogging medium won’t be king of the heap for much longer, and while we may be just now attempting to figure out how to properly monetize some of the more important voices in our community, the opportunity for us all to use the existing [...]
Steven,
I agree with that. Some can for sponsorship match making service would definitely be interesting. I think that creative commons is only trying to see how they can reduce the transaction cost overhead of content sharing/syndication so I think that it is worth keeping that conversation alive.
Edwin
Steven,
I agree with that. Some can for sponsorship match making service would definitely be interesting. I think that creative commons is only trying to see how they can reduce the transaction cost overhead of content sharing/syndication so I think that it is worth keeping that conversation alive.
Edwin
the part of your post I most agree with is that advertising must change. Sure, itneeds to change for small volume bloggers, but it also needs to change everywhere else. The core problem is really about the .001 relevance of ads to readers. That is, less than one in a thousand readers is interested in the ads.
Why irritate 999 of your readers with an ad they don’t want? Why have ads at all if that is the outcome?
ads need to be a heck of a lot more useful, interesting, relevant… And then the economics will get fixed
[...] Advertising for bloggers has to change [...]
[...] there will have to be a dramatic shift in the models used by advertisers to spend their money; which I have written about before, but that isn’t going to happen anytime soon. That doesn’t mean though that one should [...]
bridge bidding…
It has since been implemented in most other blogging tools.) Some individuals or companies have abused the TrackBack feature to insert…