When SEOmoz started running banner ads in July of 2005, we had about 400-500 unique visitors per day. Now, we're well over 1500 uniques each day (and that's over the holidays), and yet, I've only had a single advertiser interested in buying the new blog format ads.
I'm not considering switching back to the old format (I don't think it was valuable for visitors or advertisers), but I am interested to note how averse to risk advertisers appear to be. With attention from Newsweek, Slashdot and the SEO community, SEOmoz is a very focused and comparitively inexpensive way to buy targeted traffic interested in the SEOs of the world, so why the lack of advertisers?
Chalk it up to the new format. Whereas advertisers were willing to pay ~$400-$500 a month to be listed on the side of blog and articles pages, they're less eager to try a new format like the blog ads because it's unfamiliar territory. I'm guessing that this applies not only to SEOmoz, but to the Internet advertising field as a whole, hence the popularity of AdSense, AdWords, Overture and the DoubleClick ad system.
I'm lucky to be among the few who can defy the norm and reject revenue from the site entirely. Many bloggers and site owners don't have that option and must rely on the revenue choices given them. Is it any wonder that paid link advertising has such a hard time getting off the ground? Or that editorial-style ads (advertorials) haven't become mainstream?
What do you think? Do your experiences mirror these, or do you think adoption is moving at a faster pace? Where do you think web ads can go from here?
ADDED: Just found this - IHT's Advertising Supplements - which fit in with the idea of advertorials, but rely on the print version and doesn't link out... Worth a look, though.
Why not do both? I promise to block the banners and read some of the ad posts.
I contacted the company who posted an ad last time on your site to buy some links... I never heard from them... Could have been a good conversion.
Ipurchased links from the last advert, I think they must have done OK out of the deal. I would try it but i really dont have any sites that would be of intrest to your visitors :)
Maybe the price tag is considered high considering the advert may only be "hot" for a day and visable for a few days before being archived? Personally, if i was an advertiser, i would prefer to do a blog AD then receive a little button link for a month pointing to the blog post to get a little more life from the deal.
I think the idea of blog ads is great, but it also means that advertisers have to be very, very on target. An ad on the side might not be exactly what the visitor is looking for, but their persistence on the page may lead to a click. That click, even if it's only out of curiosity, is a definite buy-in.
If you have an entire post as an ad, unless the reader is really interested in it immediately, they will leave without a second thought.
But hey, you're welcome to try an experiment with my site, if you'd like :-D. (the site itself is an experiment --www.gopulls.com---)
Barry, that's my point - I'm trying to pull in folks who wouldn't normally read ads and say "trust me - it's actually worth reading this thing."
I don't want to run irrellevant or low quality ads and I want the ads themselves to be worthy of editorial content - discussions, eye-openings, etc.
BTW - Andy, I loved your B-List post at SEJournal. I'm totally writing a follow-up to that.
Being an RSS junky, notification of an adv, is kinda annoying. With RSS I didn't see them at all.
Why didn't you like the older format?
I personally dislike ads that are entries.
I didn't like them for a lot of reasons:
1. They add a commercial look & feel to the site that I didn't like aesthetically
2. Low CTR - means low value for advertisers and low value for readers
3. No conversation - there could be no feedback for the advertiser or the readers about the product/service
4. No recognition that the advertisers have been 'editorially' approved by me. I only let ads on the site from companies I would use myself - I acutally talk to their customers if I don't use them myself and check them out before putting them here.
5. No temporal aspects - updates, news, etc. available.
So - I switched over. Barry - what do you dislike about blog entry ads?
I'll chalk it up to advertisers being lazy, and having little imagination or taste for experimentation.
The adverpost format probably IS better, but that doesn't mean you will sell more of them!
I was and still am interested in the new format. We were only able to do a month of advertising before the format changed. Since then I have been so busy with renovating the office and the holiday, that I haven't gotten time to sit down and write a worthy post.
I think that the blog ad model could be better than the other, but many people don't have the time to create a good blog post. Traditional banners are so much easier to make quickly and then forget about. A blog post takes much more time for multiple reasons.
I would also agree that many are apprehensive because they have no idea what the potential return could be. Maybe an ad post study or something similar, to get the word out to advertisers about the potential of making an ad post would be appropriate. It would also provide some better statistics about click-through rates and the general response expected with making an ad post.
I still do intend to make an ad post in the next few weeks, I would be happy to provide statistics if you are interested in doing a study yourself.