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Brent Hill is Vice President, Advertising Services, at FeedBurner, the market-leading feed management provider, where he cultivates relationships with both traditional and interactive marketing agencies and corporate marketers. Prior to FeedBurner, Brent was President of Classic Kids, a national children's portrait studio and an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at OCA Ventures. He is a frequent speaker on the topic of feed advertising and his insights have been published in a variety of publications including Advertising Age, Adotas and DMNews

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Syndicated Content Sells: How to Solidify Ad Strategies within Distributed Media

Written on
July 20th 2006
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by Brent Hill  |
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Meanwhile, the All-Star blog has basically one page — the homepage. The author’s updates to the blog are unpredictable. Some days she doesn’t add even a single post, but on other days there may be ten new stories. This isn’t unusual with blog publishing today. In fact, Boing Boing and Engadget, two of the most popular blogs in the world, regularly post 10-20 new stories per day.

Due to the way content is organized on a blog, users tend to navigate vertically as opposed to following the more “horizontal” nature of content organized on a Web site. Fewer clicks and more scrolling via the trackwheel is a common characteristic of blog reading. But what about deep linking into blog content from search results? Most blogs have at least two templates that are modified by a user — the homepage, and the individual item page. The latter is utilized when a user finds blog content via search results, or clicks on a headline for the story in an RSS feed. In some content categories — consumer electronics, for example — there may be more page views generated by this type of display than the homepage itself, suggesting that organic search results are indeed important for driving traffic to a blog.

Ad Spaces on Blogs

The advertisements that appear on most blogs occupy traditional ad zones on the page - namely, a banner or leaderboard across the top, and one or more ad units on the left or right rail. These placements make a lot of sense on Web sites that are designed with “horizontal” navigation in mind. However, the vertical nature of blogs tends to focus the reader’s attention on the center of the page, where almost all of the informational value is delivered. Further, as a user scrolls down the page to read other posts in reverse chronological order, the ads pay the price. Vertical scrolling introduces a ratio of content-to-advertising that is skewed much more toward content than on most commercial sites.

If blog readers are wearing out their trackwheels scrolling down the page, they are entering an almost ad-free zone on most blogs. Even the more permanent “blog sponsorship” ad unit is likely to be missed due to a scroll-happy reader. The blog format has introduced much more interaction below the fold compared to traditional sites. In order for advertisers to maximize the opportunity for this new wave of content creators and help them monetize a bigger percentage of their content, ad spaces need to evolve to leverage reader behavior. Ultimately, understanding how a user consumes content will be a critical step in developing an effective strategy and campaign.


Contextual Matching

When evaluating blogs as a component of a media program, media planners often ask about contextual matching. To date, most of the “matching” of blog content to advertising has been based on a top-level categorization of the content. Given that most of the ad dollars are flowing to the blogs that cover narrow categories, and authors have started to survey their audiences to develop demographic profiles, the category and demographic sale is suitable for the large blogs that rarely, if ever, deviate from their main topic.

But in the long tail of blog publishing, it’s not unusual for a writer to discuss a professional topic in one post, a local event in another, and a personal matter in the next. How does an advertiser or ad network categorize that content and optimize campaigns to suit this variety? Contextual matching at the item level introduces a level of targeting that can be very effective.

What’s Ahead

Blogs, podcasts and syndicated content feeds are going to be part of the online media mix in a significant way. Whether this represents 5% of the online content diet or 50% isn’t the issue, as either of those percentages make blogs material. In order for marketers to leverage the wealth of content available today, the participants in the supply chain of feed advertising — from creatives to planners to ad networks to technology providers — will need to continue to innovate. There is no reason why distributed media, in all of its forms, can’t spark a creative revolution on par with the launch party of any Hollywood premiere.



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