Blog Advertising - Context Is King

The potential for commercially-minded bloggers, independent publishers and NewsMasters to earn revenues from advertising on their sites has been the subject of a great deal of hypothesizing. Actual real-life examples are still few and far between.

But, as Robin Good has previously stated:

"These are critical, highly dynamic and hot topics that will determine the ability and effectiveness with which independent publishers will be able to consolidate the weight, influence and long-term sustainability of their efforts."

As an existing or aspiring financially independent publisher and/or NewsMaster, the sheer amount of effort required in researching, analyzing, writing and publishing content on your area of expertise is onerous enough.

Having then to put on a salesperson's hat and do your own business development to entice prospective advertisers and sponsors to fund your operation is not, typically, an attractive task.

However, there are people and organizations out there that have been thinking very hard about how to make this process much easier for the content creators and the level of activity in this new advertising services sector is hotting up, which bodes very well for the "long-term sustainability" of independent publishers.

In August 2004, Robin Good wrote that the "many contextual ad brokering agencies that have emerged out there, are either stuck in a traditional advertising paradigm, sleep on their dreams, or have yet not understood at all the rules governing effective media consumption in the age of personalization".

That was two months ago. Yesterday, Kanoodle, a provider of sponsored links for search results and content pages, announced the launch of its (memorably named) 'BrightAds Automated Content-Targeted Sponsored Links Solution'.

What is noteworthy here is that BrightAds is being targetted specifically at small to medium sized content publishers.

"Kanoodle, a leading provider of sponsored listings for search results and content pages, today announced the launch of BrightAds(TM), a self-service tool for small- to medium-sized content publishers that will enable them to run Kanoodle's content-targeted sponsored links on their sites. With the launch of BrightAds, it is now easy for independent Web publishers to add highly relevant sponsored links advertisements to their sites and generate immediate revenue...

..."BrightAds offers small- to medium-sized publishers the ability to monetize all of the pages on their sites using the same leading suite of content-targeting products enjoyed by the Web's leading publishers," said Doug Perlson, SVP and General Manager of Kanoodle."

In another press release yesterday, Pheedo, a company specializing in web log and RSS feed advertising, announced that it had acquired Blogsnob, a weblog advertising exchange.

Blogsnob's Chief Executive, Adam Kalsey, said:

"By combining the strengths of our companies, we are poised to grow rapidly and further the cause of helping micro-publishers succeed. This acquisition means we can provide improved services to our exchange members. This is a huge step forward for the weblog community. Blogsnob members can be assured we are committed to keeping the ad exchange free and improving the service."

Although these are relatively minor developments in the grand scheme of things, they do augur well for the future of the independent publisher.

Related articles:

• RSS Wave: Good Ideas For Business And Marketing Applications
  MasterNewMedia -- September 15, 2004