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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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Blogvertising 3.0: Exploring the Evolution of and Year Ahead for Monetizing the Blogosphere

Written on
March 5th 2007
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by Brent Hill  |
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When FeedBurner extended its RSS-based advertising program and offered bloggers an opportunity to place ads on their sites, we positioned an IAB-standard ad unit — in this case, a 300 x 250 medium rectangle — in between the blog posts. The rationale for the location on the page is rather intuitive…the readership pattern on a blog goes right down the center of the page, where blog posts are located, and it offers a great opportunity to engage a reader.

To leverage the long-page format of blogs, look for blog ad networks to open up additional ad units between the posts further down the page. With traditional pageviews, there’s usually a significant drop-off in clickthrough performance between an ad that appears above-the-fold, vs. those at the bottom of the page. As a result, rate cards show a hefty discount applied to that inventory, and that space is often used for alternatively priced ads — such as CPC.

As publishers open up new ad zones on blogs, it will be important to measure the performance on a relative basis to the location on the page — otherwise advertisers will continue to demand that these ads be highly discounted. If publishers can prove that their audience is actually paging down to view more than just the most recent blog post, and clickthrough rates on ads down the page drop off more slowly than on a typical page, then more advertisers will utilize this inventory, and the pricing support will encourage publishers to make more ad zones available. The result will be a re-balancing of content and advertising

Negative Content Control

The first step is negative content control. Many advertisers lump all blogs — regardless of the focus or quality of editorial — in the category of “user-generated content”, alongside things like personal profile pages, user-submitted videos, and podcasts. As a result, some brands are concerned, and rightly so, about that awkward adjacency, where their ad appears next to a blog post containing unsuitable content — whether it’s profanity, or a discussion of an individual’s personal experience with the company’s product or service.

To protect against this, look for blog advertising platforms to offer advertisers a form of “negative content control”, in which the advertiser provides a list of keywords or phrases that serve to disqualify the content from containing an ad for that advertiser. The ad server simply moves on to another advertiser.

Sponsorships

The sponsorship model is a staple of offline advertising, and we have seen it migrate to the web. Commercial publishers offer sponsorships for sections of content, user tools, and site features.

Only a small number of blogs, meanwhile, offer an advertiser a persistent sponsorship opportunity, where the marketer’s advertisement and messaging is associated with the publisher’s content for an extended period. FeedBurner began marketing a sponsorship ad unit for blogs and RSS feeds in the first quarter of 2007, and already it’s been well received by marketers that want a high share of voice and strong association with certain blogs and their audience. What’s unique about the ad unit is that it accompanies the publisher’s content as users engage through various means…whether it’s scrolling down the page to view multiple posts, reading in an RSS reader, or even through a web widget.

Rich Media

With more users connected via broadband, advertising has followed content — we see more rich media applied to advertising than ever before. On blogs, meanwhile, rich media is noticeably absent. In 2007, we can expect to see the ad servers developed specifically for blogs to begin using 4th party media vendors — like Pointroll or Klipmart — to deliver richer ad units to blogs.

When FeedBurner began offering Flash delivery for ads on blogs in the fourth quarter of 2006, most advertisers quickly migrated over to Flash ads in place of static or animated GIFs.

What’s Ahead

2007 will be the year of Blog Advertising 3.0. The ad budgets of political candidates and blue-chip advertisers will foster innovation, while opportunistic companies and their publishing partners will seize the opportunity to build sustainable ad-supported models.



Reader Comments.

There is a blog-site that offers advertisers a way to “take advantage of the site format and viewing patterns on blogs.” Slashdot has an ‘Opinion Center’ where Intel is doing just that - they can talk directly to their customers and potential customers.

Posted by Jeff | 12:51 pm on March 6, 2007.

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