New Services Help Bloggers Bring in Ad Revenue
Users Can Customize
Appearance of Spots,
Use Video and Audio
By KELLY K. SPORS
(See Corrections & Amplifications item below.)
If you're not making money off your blog, 2008 might be the year.
As more people see potential in earning money off the Internet, there is a quickly expanding array of advertising services and tools for bloggers that go well beyond the standard pay-per-click text ads or display ads.
Many of the most widely used programs are adding features to allow users to customize the appearance and placement of ads on their sites. Some also are introducing newer money-making mediums such as audio and video ads.
MONEY MAKERS
• What's New: A growing array of services and tools are helping bloggers earn advertising dollars on their sites.
• The Options: There are audio spots as well as ads tacked on to videos featured in blogs. Some tools also allow publishers to customize the appearance and placement of ads.
• The Potential: Publishers and analysts say ad revenue will depend on a site's traffic, the trustworthiness of its content and the relevancy of the ads.
"There's going to be a lot of new business models in 2008 that are geared toward more monetization," says Pete Blackshaw, executive vice president of strategic services for Nielsen Online, the Web analysis unit of the Nielsen Co.
Blog publishers could certainly use the help in making money. The vast majority of publishers make less than $10 or $20 a month through advertising, according to Internet-advertising experts. How much money is made through advertising on a site depends much on how much traffic a site gets, the trustworthiness of the content and how relevant the ads are to the visitors.
Audio and Video
Starting Feb. 1, San Diego-based V2P Communications is offering five-to-eight-second audio ads, called NetAudioAds, that will automatically play when a visitor lands on a blog or Web site. Publishers sign up for the free service and V2P then lines up advertisers, who bid on rates they will pay to have their ads played on a given blog. Bids generally start around $14 per 1,000 plays. Blog publishers get a 25% cut of the ad revenue.
About 25,000 publishers have signed up so far, says Michael Knox, V2P's co-founder, and several large companies and 2008 presidential campaigns have expressed interest in becoming advertisers through the service. A site that gets 2,000 unique visitors per day with an advertiser paying $14 per 1,000 plays might earn $28 a day, or $196 a week.
[Blogging for Dollars]
Another model that's expected to gain traction this year are ads connected to videos. Revver Inc.'s Revver.com lets advertisers tack on ads to videos uploaded to the video-sharing site. Publishers who then put those videos on their sites, earn 20% of all ad revenue generated from plays of the videos on the blogs. Revver and the videos' creators, often amateurs, split the remainder.
In October, Google Inc. released Video Units, a program that allows Web-site publishers who use its AdSense program -- which places Google-brokered ads on other Web sites based on the sites' content -- to add YouTube videos to their blog sites and have ads appear on the video player.
Some ad services are trying to help publishers expand their advertising by putting ads in their blog's Really Simple Syndication, or RSS feeds, which send blog posts out to subscribers. Some services even specialize in providing ads to publishers that pop up when someone visits the blog from a mobile phone.
More Appealing
Many of the most widely used ad programs -- such as AdSense and Amazon.com Inc.'s affiliate-marketing program, where publishers get a cut of all sales generated from ads on their site -- also are trying to make ads more appealing. For instance, they have rolled out new features in recent months to give publishers more control over how the ads look and where they are placed.
AdSense recently began testing gadget ads, which are more visually stimulating with graphics and interactive features than the traditional basic text ads the program offers.
"One of the biggest things we're trying to do is create more ad formats for publishers," says Google spokesman Brandon McCormick, adding that AdSense paid $3.5 billion to publishers in the first three quarters of 2007.
Meantime, Amazon.com in September introduced several free widgets -- easy-to-use programs that, by plugging a code into a site or blog, let publishers customize how and where ads appear in a blog. One widget lets people embed links to Amazon products in their text, while another lets publishers create a slideshow of relevant Amazon products displayed on their site. Amazon affiliates earn up to a 10% commission on all sales directed from their ads.
Enough to Make a Living
Some bloggers already are seeing results. Rhett Butler, founder of Mongabay.com, a site with articles on rainforest conservation and other environmental issues, makes $15,000 to $18,000 a month from AdSense, using various types of ads. Mr. Butler says his blog currently gets about 1.3 million unique visitors per month.
He's planning to eventually experiment with Google's video player ads and create his own video content for the site. "The rainforest has always been my passion, but I never expected to make a living off of it," says Mr. Butler, who quit his job as a product manager in 2003 when he realized he could make a living off his site.
Darren Rowse, the Melbourne, Australia-based writer of ProBlogger.net, a popular blog that teaches other bloggers how to make money, earned roughly $250,000 in 2007 off ads on three blogs he writes. Mr. Rowse says he makes the most off traditional display advertising, where advertisers pay a fee to appear, but he also has used affiliate ads and Google AdSense.
Mr. Rowse says publishers should experiment with several types of advertising and use an analytics program to figure out which ones are most effective. Once they do that, bloggers should, for the most part, rely on just one or two advertising programs "so they don't clutter the site," he says. Bloggers should be careful to pick advertising that doesn't appear to taint the content or reputation of the site, he adds.
Mr. Rowse says certain types of advertising can be most effective for certain sites. For instance, affiliate programs, such as Amazon's, tend to work best on sites with loyal followers who trust their blogger for recommendations. Sites with lots of general search-engine traffic but fewer devotees may do better with a contextual ad program, such as AdSense. Regular display ads can also be very effective, he says, depending on how well the ad matches the site's content.
Write to Kelly K. Spors at kelly.spors@wsj.com
Corrections & Amplifications:
Using V2P Communications' coming audio ads, which will pay blog publishers a 25% commission on ad revenue, a site that gets 2,000 unique visitors a day with an advertiser paying $14 per 1,000 plays would earn $7 a day, or $49 a week. This column incorrectly says the site would earn $28 a day, or $196 a week.
