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Advertising In blogs : Survey findings

Qumana, which produces a free blog publishing application, conducted a survey on advertising in blogs. Though I am not a proponent of ads on professional marketing blogs, here's the findings.

  • 37% of bloggers had ads on their blogs
  • 22% had ads in their RSS feeds
  • 85 (ish) % of those with Ads use Adsense
  • 34% of bloggers who don’t participate in advertising do intend to sign up for an advertising program of some sort

The vast, vast majority of blogs are not going to make more than a few bucks a month from advertising. Knowing that, why would you want to cheapen the look of your marketing and PR blog with ads? Perhaps its because the majority of blogs look so darn ugly, it doesn't matter.

You won't see ads on blogs published by LexBlog customers. The blog sites are some of the best designed on the net and the law firms and other companies publishing the blogs will get a heck of a lot more in new business than a few bucks a month.

Sure, advertising needs to support blogs and RSS. But let blog search engines and aggregators carry the ads. They'll do it just Google's search engine does today with sponsored links. That's why Google launched it's blog search engines – to sell ads on the search engine site and on the feeds the search engine will deliver.

Source of post: Problogger

  • http://www.qumana.com Arieanna

    Hi Kevin,
    Thanks for the commentary on the survey. I do, in part, agree with you. Most people go way over the top throwing in too many ads, making the ads stand out with flashy graphics or just really not considering it too much.
    We actually thought so much about it, and about how to make it better (after all, as pro bloggers ourselves, we make our living from blogging) that we started our own ad company and put it inside Qumana. The ads go into posts – but don't need to go in all. It's completetly user driven – from keyword to design to placement. The end result is tasteful, relevant ads. We hope it's an improvement.

  • John Keeton

    You are correct, most blogs make little money. It is also fact that plenty of blawgs make very good revenue.
    The truth is that if you know what you are doing and run multivariate testing you can increase revenue significantly and control the ads shown.
    Should Blawgs run ads? If they want to.
    Ads run in some of the most respected publications without tarnishing expert positioning one iota.
    It’s down to taste. Yes Adwords are tacky. Yes, from experience they can earn well and Google is pulling a billion a month for a reason.
    My personal preference is to not to have tacky ads, however the only thing worse than running very tacky ads is blogging about them so often as to make the blog unreadable…