Blog advertising
There seem to be mixed feelings from the blog service providers in the region about the advertising potential of blogs. Mark Saunt of the Al Bawaba Group says it is "somewhat unethical and generally a waste of money for the advertiser." whereas Jeeran's Omar Koudsi claims that "Blogs, being one of the most powerful web tools by far, are offering endless opportunities in the advertising world. Soon we will see more large advertisers turning to blogs to increase sincerity of their campaigns."
It is worth noting that Mr. Koudsi comes from a technical background, spitting a bunch of techie jargon in his interview on Campaign, while Mr. Saunt comes off as one who takes the moral high ground.
What both can't seem to understand is that advertisers will never advertise with 'random' blogs. However, an advertiser may want to advertise with very popular blogs (Secret Dubai Diary comes to mind, for UAE blogs). There is no question that advertisers will sooner or later look into advertising on blogs seriously.
The question that no one seems to be asking is, how does this affect the legitimacy of a blogger allowing major advertisers to advertise there? Where do PR agencies stand on this? Currently, not a single PR or media monitoring agency has begun to even attempt to monitor blogs. For the most part, most folks in the media industry are still not taking blogging seriously enough. This is going to change as more quality and topic-specific blogs begin to surface. What do you think?
It is worth noting that Mr. Koudsi comes from a technical background, spitting a bunch of techie jargon in his interview on Campaign, while Mr. Saunt comes off as one who takes the moral high ground.
What both can't seem to understand is that advertisers will never advertise with 'random' blogs. However, an advertiser may want to advertise with very popular blogs (Secret Dubai Diary comes to mind, for UAE blogs). There is no question that advertisers will sooner or later look into advertising on blogs seriously.
The question that no one seems to be asking is, how does this affect the legitimacy of a blogger allowing major advertisers to advertise there? Where do PR agencies stand on this? Currently, not a single PR or media monitoring agency has begun to even attempt to monitor blogs. For the most part, most folks in the media industry are still not taking blogging seriously enough. This is going to change as more quality and topic-specific blogs begin to surface. What do you think?
posted by Dubai Media Observer at 7:54 PM
9 Comments:
Even the most popular regional blogs have miniscule traffic compared to other advertising media, although there is a high level of repeat traffic.
I don't think we'll see advertising on blogs until the traffic levels increase significantly. As for ethical issues, I for one would be very happy to carry ads on my blog in return for large chunks of money!
i don't know keefie boy, khaleej times servers are pathetic, they have to redirect under heavy load, maybe they're getting ripped off for their hosting, but i get 500 gb of bandwidth a month for 10 USD, so say each visitor loaded 100 kb, that's 50000000 visitors (if my maths is correct), i'd love to imagine i have more money than khaleej times.
on top of that, khaleej times has upto 12-15 ads on a single page, absolutely whore their page for money.
I think if the author puts a decent amount of effort into their blog, they should be able to put ads, it'd probably only amount to 10 USD a month in insanely large amounts of traffic, but for me, that's a bit of extra money to spend cos of my tiny student like budget.
Don't expect anything great out of placing ads, it's probably more trouble than it's worth for me living in Australia, as i'd have to start filing tax returns etc, which i don't want to do. In dubai however, no tax, so it's better.
I personally enjoy blogging, not bothered to put ads at the moment, i like writing, and i hope people enjoy reading, if i did put ads, it wouldn't be for the money, it'd be for a little bit of extra money on the weekend, i don't think that most bloggers would just have their blog so they can stick ads on it, it's just a bit of extra money, especially when someone has to pay for their own hosting (which i don't), it'd be cool if ads covered the cost.
keefieboy, you are right about the current regional blogs. This is because even the most popular regional blogs are not topical, with the exception of, perhaps, the Emirates Economist.
I think PR has a lot more to get out of blogs, because of the 'sincerity' issue.
samuraisam, I've been there before. Advertisers quickly find out what they are paying for when it comes to online advertising. Unlike printed ads, you can actually centralize the tracking and get some fairly accurate information about the readership. KT probably needs to place that many ads to meet their quota.
Hello there, I want to thank you for bringing up this worthy topic, not only because it's self-serving (Jeeran having the biggest number of Middle East bloggers), but maybe this new trend would catapult the whole industry to change the way it deals with online advertising.
As for advertising on blogs or not, well, this is not 2001, its 2005 there is no more argument about it.. Advertising on blogs has become mainstream, and a whole niche of blog advertising agencies have crop up. Using the moral ground of any argument against a blogger is as useless as using it against any publication or website using advertising to generate revenue substantial enough to justify putting the needed time and effort to come up with even more quality content.
Google is already experimenting with blog specific adverting (read more here: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1789836,00.asp). Yahoo news will start offering blogs as a source of news; it doesn’t get more mainstream than this.
No one said advertisers should advertise on random blogs. Just like any other source of content, advertisers will always seek to advertise on quality sources. Sorry, but this wasn’t mentioned by any of us because it really does go without saying. Just like if we were to say lets advertise on classified newspapers, doesn’t mean we will advertise on all of them, quality ones will be selected
Let us reverse the argument; some bloggers could gain legitimacy if industry heavy weights advertise on their blogs.
As for PR and ad agencies view on blogs in the region, im not too optimistic on them jumping the bandwagon and be leaders in the online advertising space. We are still having a hard time convincing some of the major players that the typical online campaign of mostly mail shots and banners here and there are a thing of the past.
Since your blog description is "A critical view of the media industry in the UAE" I highly recommend dedicating a post on this, how agencies are doing their clients a big disservice by not shifting to newer models like contextual advertising, blog advertising, and sponsorships. They are still stuck on ways that came were used when online advertising came out.
In the end, I want to point out that you didn’t give me enough credit! You decided to pock fun of my technical background ? and didn’t realize that by the end of your post, we both seem to be saying the same thing "There is no question that advertisers will sooner or later look into advertising on blogs seriously." Bringing the moral argument against blog advertising takes us back to the early years of 20th century, when people complained advertising distorts the way newspapers are written. I am surprised this argument came from someone in the marketing field, it’s the kind of argument you would hear from a so called techie like me!
Mr. Koudsi, thank you for dropping by!
A few clarifications:
1. What I meant by 'random blogs' is simply contextual ads -- in other words, the advertiser has no idea where exactly their ad will appear. It isn't that agencies are doing their clients a disservice, it is the client who does not understand it to accept it.
2. The typical campaigns that you call a thing of the past are actually quite effective and have rather tangible results.
3. I did not mean to 'poke fun' at your technical background. I simply wanted to draw the distinction between the two of you. Especially that you both had very different views on the topic (and you are right, his arguments seemed to be of a techie zealot rather than a marketing person -- but I don't know his background).
I have Google Adwords enabled on my blog, and sometimes the results are bizarre. Early on, I was getting ads for a US baptist church, triggered I believe by an entry about a mosque "preacher".
Now I mainly get property ads - ironic, given many entries and comments are negative about property.
Well, that's up to them to control whether it appears on your blog or not (I think Google has a system where you can limit that, just like you can block certain advertisers from advertising on your site).
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