blogging business - tracking the advertising play for blogging
Almost interesting article on the advertising business side of blogging with a particular look at themovieblog.com. I should really read the whole article before starting to blog about it though, because by the time I got to the end I realized it was really about tripe.
The good points are this. The Movie Blog seems to make about $400 a month, using Google's Adsense on about 300,000 page views, and gets about 7cents a click. Those are very cheap clicks through rates in my opinion. That's about 6,000 ads clicked on which means about 2% of page views get a click through. Since it appears there are about 3 ads on a page that mean the average clicks per ads shown is aproximately .6% or a whopping .006 success rate. That means about 150 ads are shown for every one clicked on, or 50 pages are shown for every one ad clicked. Hmm.. You might want to check my math, that actually seems more effective than I thought. Still that's a tremendous amount of static.
Meanwhile Richard Brome's Phone Scoop blog gets about 20 million page views, and he's made enough to hire a full-time employee. Though it doesn't say how much he makes.
Also, mentioned are some not so well recieved attempts such as the Kevin Kringle blog which was a shill for Best Buy and the Raging Cow blog which was a shill for Dr. Pepper / Seven Up. The Kringle blog people didn't seem to get or care about, from what I've heard and read (including seeing the ads) people thought it was just plain stupid. The Raging Cow incident sparked quite a bit of backlash and a boycott. Now one of the people behind raging cow is at it again with a new site for a new agency and a new client. This time they're going with full disclosure, though we'll see.
The project is called the
Project D.U. and it seems to be a news aggregator application. I tried downloading it, but I stopped short when it required full access to my computer without a readme or an indication of what it was installing and where. I'm curious from an academic stand point but I'm not so curious I'd let an advertising firm with suspect history unfettered access to install anything on my computer. I also found the website a little oboxious, but then their target market seems to be a much younger crowd, say 16 year olds. The point seems to be to shill Cingular Wireless and SBC phone and internet services. Blarg, when did this crap get so borring and annoying. I actually resent the news article that brought me to this and left so many questions unanswered. Was it a teaser? Hopefully if you read this you won't resent me for such, for at least I got to the bottom of this boring tripe quickly. Life's to short.
"People were upset with the premise that marketing dollars were invading the blog community," said Todd Copilevitz, who worked at the time for The Richards Group, the ad agency on the Raging Cow campaign. "We were one of the first down the path and suffered a slew of arrows."
That hasn't stopped Copilevitz, now director of digital initiatives in Dallas for the TracyLocke agency, from going down that path again.
TracyLocke, owned by global ad giant Omnicom Group, is working with telephone industry giant SBC Communications Inc. on a Web site called "Project D.U." (for "digital universe"). The site, launched in October, is a portal to a network of blogs, including sites for music and sports.
The campaign clearly states its sponsorship. "Presented by SBC" is written below ads for Cingular Wireless, a cell phone network 60 percent owned by SBC.
The bloggers are paid a small licensing fee for the content of their sites, Copilevitz said. But SBC has no control over the content of the blogs, and that's a risk for any advertiser.
"What makes [blogs] cutting edge and appealing makes them dangerous and unpredictable," Copilevitz said. "This is marketing not for the weak of heart."
Chicago Tribune | Bloggers blend business with stuff they like
Chicago, IL
