Adotas

Where media buyers start online

Featured Author

Author Photo

More articles by Kenneth Musante





Features

Can Techmeme Turn Blog Posts into Viable Advertising?

Written on
Sep 26, 2006 
Author
Kenneth Musante  |
Share
Can Techmeme Turn Blog Posts into Viable Advertising?

I’m not talking about adverblogs. Adverblogging is a dishonest practice that yields customers of dubious quality. I’m talking about using legitimate blogs–corporate, editorial, or personal–as banner ad content.

The tech news site Techmeme automatically updates itself with the latest tech news. Gabe Rivera, the site’s creator, has launched a new sponsorship model for the site. Instead of showing standard banner ads in the side bar, Techmeme lists the most recent blog posts from the blogs of three sponsors: oDesk, a company that helps connect businesses with IT professionals, Socialtext, a company that helps businesses wikis, blogs and other forms of social software, and Wink, a social search engine. The sponsored sidebar listings display the latest excerpt from each corporate blog post. When the sponsors update their blogs, the ad on Techmeme is automatically updated as well.

Pros — There are some obvious advantages to Gabe’s blog advertising method. The content is editorial, and much more engaging than an image of a flying monkey. A user who finds the ad interesting will not just click on it or forget about it. If the blog content is interesting, they may actually spend more time actually reading it. More time means better brand recognition. Rivera has wisely included each company’s logo in the ad.

Advertisers can also change content on-the-fly without having to learn any special interfaces or ad platforms. Since the ads on Techmeme acquire their content via each blog’s RSS feed, there’s no need for the advertiser to learn some fancy system for setting up their campaign. And if they have a corporate blog anyway, they don’t even need to expend energy developing a campaign for this or that ad platform. And when they need the ad to be updated with fresh content, they only need to post new stuff to their corporate blog.

Cons — Unfortunately with an advertiser-driven system, the publisher has less control over exactly what appears on their site. All banner content is controlled by the advertiser and is not first reviewed by the publisher. There’s no guarantee that what a sponsor posts on its blog will be something that a publisher will welcome on their site, or that visitors to will necessarily be interested in.

And since the ad’s content is pulled directly from the advertiser’s corporate blog, there’s no way for an advertiser to promote one thing through the ad and write about something completely different on the blog at the same time.

Needs Progress — Both parties need a way of measuring performance. I haven’t been able to talk to Rivera about this yet, but the hyperlinks in the sponsored blog section of Techmeme don’t contain any of the click-tracking information you find with other forms of sponsored link advertising.

Online advertisers are spoiled. Unlike TV or print advertisers, they’re not satisfied with statistical estimates. They need to know exactly how many people clicked where, how many actions were performed, how many new subscribers were gained, etc. and they want to know it all in real-time, minute-by-minute. At the same time, publishers need to know if they’re charging a fair price for placement.





Reader Comments.

Hi Kenneth. I agree smarter click tracking would be good.

About the publisher’s lack of control: yes, a potential issue, but probably mostly mitigated by picking respectable sponsors, plus perhaps a clause allowing the publisher to block a post. (I didn’t introduce such terms with my group of sponsors because…I guess I trust them. We’re small startups, too busy to antagonize each other!)

Thoughtful post, thanks.

Posted by Gabe | 3:16 pm on September 26, 2006.

Leave a Comment

Add a comment

Tags: , and
Article Sponsor

More Features


  • Right now, at the beginning of 2012, what are you watching the most closely for its ad and marketing opportunities?

    View Results

    Loading ... Loading ...

Latest News

News Archive

Spotlight

Sponsormob Leads the Way Into RTB for MobileADOTAS – For more than half a decade, Berlin-based tech firm Sponsormob has remained relevant in an industry characterized by [...] more...


Adotas Partnership