Blog Ads to become Blog-snob

Duncan Riley> Some interesting changes afoot over at BlogAds with Henry Copeland announcing BlogAds 3.0, including some new functionality and a new referral process.

The previous application process will also be overhauled seemingly to exclude bloggers who Henry writes have a “snowball’s chance in the Sahara of interesting advertisers”.

Now, the change to exclude smaller bloggers is perhaps the most significant change to be reported here, and I did intend on posting it without comment, but to do so would be unfair to Henry.

Firstly, I was surprised reading Henry’s post that applying to get on BlogAds had become so complicated. I joined over a year ago and back then it wasn’t hard. I didn’t even really give BlogAds a second thought at first because getting advertisers on the service was difficult if you weren’t a political blogger. The way traffic is recorded there has also always been a mystery to me, for example The Blog Herald seems to average about 10,000 ad views (a week??) on their list, but this doesn’t actually reflect the figures coming out of the logs or even Adsense for that matter. As traffic grew though I actively promoted the advertising choice and I’m happy to say for the most part that I’ve had a reasonable flow of advertisers from it.

What Henry says in the post is that basically he is going to be more snobby in who BlogAds provides advertising to because basically he’s been inundated with applicants, many of whom don’t fit the model he wants to pursue. And if this is what he wants to do, that’s fair enough; he is, after all, not providing a public service but running a business, and it does make sense. The decision will, however, upset some people, and I can see their side as well. Henry’s going for the top of the long tail, and is no longer looking at the bottom. What the decision really means is that there is plenty of room in the blogosphere for more competitors to BlogAds who are happy to cater for the smaller blogs, and I’ll bet we’ll see this happen soon. There are some out there who may fit the bill already, like Jim Kukral at Blogkits.com, who you may note is a long term advertiser using BlogAds here at the Blog Herald, although I’d note that Jim states he isn’t looking at competing with BlogAds. At the end of the day only time will tell.

For new bloggers coming in, I am happy to recommend BlogAds as a good service when you start getting some reasonable traffic, but its strengths lie in political blogs and entertainment related blogs, including humour, showbiz and others. In the tech or IT fields there are opportunities but they are a bit more limited. In other fields, you’re probably better of with Adsense, Blogkits or some of the other advertising options now available.