WSJ: Blogosphere Too Wild For Advertisers

Posted on March 25, 2005

A new Wall Street Journal article discusses advertising and weblogs. The article starts by discussing Cheaptickets decision to pull its ads from Gawker Media's Gridskipper travel blog after running just a few days -- Gawker's CEO thinks they thought the blog was "too naughty". Next the WSJ article explains how most weblogs have little in the way of advertisements:

The vast majority of the 8 million or so blogs currently in existence have few if any ads. Many are run by hobbyists or armchair commentators, some of whom sign up to carry tiny text ads from a large pool of advertisers through a service from Google Inc. The ads generate revenue only when a visitor clicks on the ad. Most bloggers, like Ronni Bennett, a former television producer who lives in New York's Greenwich Village and writes about aging on timegoesby.net, can't even offset the cost of her Internet access. Her site gets between 1,200 and 1,500 page views a day, bringing in all of $50 since December 2004.

Because blogging is also a hobby there will always be many blogs without advertisements. Plus, most blogs are created by teenagers who tend to want editorial control over their domain more than they want advertisements. Most of the ads people do see on blogs tend to be text ads from contextual ad networks like Google AdSense which does not generate much revenues for blogs with little traffic. The article also discusses Blogads.com, which is a third-party advertising network for blogs. A blunt message on the Blogads.com website reads, "Blogs with fewer than 1,000 visitors a day usually do not attract advertisers." The WSJ article did report that advertisements on Blogads have grown from 28 ads in 2002 to 1,685 last month. However, the article also contains a graph showing Blogads.com's ads growth which shows the number of ads placed at Blogads has fallen since last September before the 2004 presidential election. The WSJ article also mentions a few corporate sponsors of blogs like Sony Corp which sponsored Gawker Media's Lifehacker. But, the WSJ article also says that "many big companies are sitting on the sidelines."