Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Blog Exchange Ads

Blogger won't publish to my 9mmfilm blog. This post was meant to be for there, but I don't have time right now to figure out why Blogger is freaking out about that site so I'll just post it here. It is vaguely related to BifSniff anyways....

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I noticed Damien Mulley talking about blog ad exchange ideas, where you display ads for blogs on your site in exchange for having your blog advertised on others blogs. He specifically pointed out Feedshare which does seem like a nice implementation of the idea.

We ran something like this (might have been blogsnob) for a while on BifSniff when we started... was good for starting out, got a couple of clicks here and there, but in the end it's just another ad on your blog and as our search engine traffic grew the amount of clicks coming in from the ad exchange just weren't worth it.

I think with the whole 'community' thing with blogs there would have to be an added dimension to make this idea take off...

For example imagine a scenario where you write a post and before publishing you 'search for ads', this search would take something similar to technorati tags from your post and find related posts - ones that look interesting you approve as ads which then appear at the bottom of your post (or wherever).

A credit system could be worked out so that you get credits for showing ads and blogs with more credits get higher placement on searches for ads...

In other words you link to actual posts that are in someway related to your own post, creating ads that are much more specific and targetted, contextual ads that have been author approved as it were... I imagine something like this would work quite well, although it would take a lot more work to develop I suppose.

Anyway, there's my idle thought for the day.