Blog Advertising and Market Intelligence
Lately, there seems to be a renewed interest in the role of advertising within the blogging community. I am not sure that I've had enough time to really research and digest these issues with much detail, but some recent reading unearthed some controversy over the potential to generate revenue
At BloggerCon, Stowe Boyd was one of the few individuals that was clearly making money from sponsorships on his blog, to the tune of about $3,000 a month. This was indeed newsworthy to some, like Julie Haggerty of The New York Times, while being mystifying to others.
Most of the discussion seems to stem from a general disbelief in the value of marketing to specific audiences. I'm wondering if this debate needs to involve more innovators from the marketing space to assist those with less experience in contextualizing the marketplace.
This is the dilemma many people have, unfortunately, in learning how to extract the value in something. This value, when taken from the business point of view, must identify and acknowledge the "pain" of the buyer. Too often, someone uninformed will tend to underestimate the value of their work product.
As one comment made to Stowe's entry makes:
Your blog, according to Site Meter, has fewer than 400 visits a day. How do you make $3,000 in revenue from ad sales on such paltry stats? My blog averages more than 1,500 visits a day - and lately above 2,000. Either you're not really making that much off ads, or I'm charging way too little for ads on my blog.
I don't have anything vested in either of these parties, but I can say that it's clear that at least some of this confluct arises from the disconnect between market value and perceived value. One thing I have found, however, is that it's striking difficult to demand greater value once you've established a negative baseline.