It seems Federated Media really want to sell their ad stock this holiday season, because they’re slashing their rates to $5 CPM. This according to an email published in whole by Valleywag. Naturally, they take the snarky approach, and although it is a bit uncommon to slash the rates in the busiest period of the year, I wouldn’t say it is such a big deal really. Everyone’s feeling the recession, and it might be a good idea to make sure that you minimize the damage.

That being said, it is also a sure sign that online publishers aren’t immune to the current financial situation. Some try to make it sound like the internet will be hit last, while it really is a case of perhaps not taking the big hit, but at least joining the rest of the ad media in a downward slope at the moment.

A lot of early web adopters understood community right away. It’s the chance to reach hundreds, thousands, no - millions.

Unfortunately, most got it wrong. A web page isn’t like a television ad, reaching out to million of viewers at one time. A web page speaks to the one, a single representative of a community.

A community doesn’t start with millions. It starts with one. If you serve the one, the one will tell one, who will tell two, who will tell six, and so on and so on. If you don’t serve the one… and each one after… bye bye, community.

Social media is about the social as well as the community. This means that you have to service the individual’s needs for them to come together as a whole.

Today’s businesses have to do a total rethink. It no longer is about serving their market, it’s about serving the like-minded individuals as a collective. read more

Kontera just told us about upcoming support for their ContentLink service in blog publishing tool ScribeFire, as well as meta ad server PubMatic. This means that you’ll be able to populate your blog post with those hover ad-links on a per post basis. Read on for quotes and PR talk. read more

Hanging on the wall in a family friend’s home is a quilt bearing the name of our grandmothers. Surrounding their names are the names of men and women from their community. Funds were needed for a community project so a quilt raffle was developed. Each participant embroidered their names onto flour sacks in this once agricultural community now lost to the time and the metropolitan expansion of Marysville, Washington, USA. All the flour sack squares were sewn together to create a simple and colorful bed quilt, padded with a left over blanket and backed by a bed sheet.

The quilt was displayed in the community center of the now lost village while community members spent what little money they had on raffle tickets, knowing it was going for a worthy cause. Her grandmother won the raffle and the quilt comforted the beds and the spirits of their family’s sick and cold children for decades, finally finding its way to her wall in honor of the past and community spirit that once thrived in a place covered with housing subdivisions where no one knows their neighbors.

For the village of Sunnyside and others around the world, community quilts were their social media tools and resources. Neighbors would get together in between long days of planting, harvesting, and familial responsibilities to chat and share stories and news over pieces of fabric.

Local bars served the same purpose, along with food and drink, to create a family away from family where people could be “themselves” and share their thoughts with others, often encouraged by the spirits. read more

David Ogilvy, in what is perhaps one of history’s greatest understatements, referred to himself plainly as an “advertising man”. The truth is that, in many circles, Ogilvy is though of, even today, as the advertising man, an idol in an industry where egos often run very high.

Though he first retired over thirty years ago, his writings and teachings are still standard reading for college students today. Over the course of his 40-plus year career he helped create many of advertising’s most famous print ads, he founded Ogilvy and Mather, an advertising agency is still thriving today, and he wrote two books that are still relevant today.

Ogilvy was known for his laser-focused efforts on creating ads that “make the cash register ring”. Though his approach was not as “creative” as others in the field, it was very effective. His ads also tended to favor longer body copy, including at least one ad that contained some 10,000 words. In fact, Ogilvy’s first book, “Confessions of an Advertising Man” was originally written as a lengthy piece of direct marketing, mailed out to prospective clients.

Though Ogilvy died in 1999, he left behind a powerful legacy and one that any writer, no matter the field, can glean something from. Even today, in the age of the Internet, his philosophies, Ogivlyisms and rules remain just as effective today as they did forty years ago.

What are some tips Ogilvy has to teach bloggers, here is just a sample. read more

Silicon Alley Insider have read the latest report from Rubicon Project, and draws this conclusion:

The average amount advertisers pay publishers to display their ads one thousand times — CPMs — dropped 11 percent from Q2 to Q3 across the 307 ad networks and 1,300 publishers that ad-optimizing firm The Rubicon Project calls clients.

Graph and more information in their news post.

Is the financial crisis finally showing in the ad market? I’d say yes, but it is still not as bad as it’ll be for old media.

John Chow shares his wisdom on how to apply to an ad network. It boils down to these 4 major things to consider, according to him:

• Have a Domain Name
• Use Your Domain Email
• Have a Completed About Page
• Have Contact Information On Your Site

Chow uses his own TTZ Media ad network as an example, so if you’re having trouble getting into that, check out his post. Otherwise, it’s pretty basic stuff, but still worth to read up on if you’re new to the game.

On Lorelle on WordPress, I just published “The Real Benefits of Sponsoring a WordCamp” which highlighted one of the most talked about exhibitors at Blog World Expo in Las Vegas a few weeks ago: Bruce Christensen and Tom Vail of Cart-Away Concrete.

While most of the exhibitors at Blog World Expo were there to promote their products and services to the mass of bloggers in attendance, Tom and Bruce were there for a different reason. They were there to learn.

So many events and conferences bring together a lot of people with a marketing agenda. They want to sell products and services and make money. Tom and Bruce of Cart-Away Concrete showed up at this blogging conference with their portable cement mixer and said, “We don’t have anything for you to buy. We came here to learn.”

That’s right. They just came to learn from everyone who walked through the Las Vegas Convention Center Exhibition Hall over the course of the three day event. They aren’t bloggers, they aren’t web hosts, they aren’t marketers, or guys with cool blog gadgets. They are construction experts in equipment and concrete. How many bloggers have a huge commercial construction project underway and would need them? Hmmm?

No, they were there to learn. They could hire someone to teach them what to do and set up their blogs and social media services to promote their franchise and contractor business, but that’s not what they wanted. They wanted to learn from everyone in this new online social media business.

And they did. read more

The U.S. and Canada are going through hard economic times. You knew that, right?

And you probably knew that blog networks, like all businesses, thrive or perish according to their ability to respond to changes in the economies in which they operate.

But what you maybe didn’t know is the extent to which the current economic struggles of Canada and the U.S. are affecting the blog networks you visit on a daily basis - Gawker, b5media, Federated Media, Splashpress (which owns this blog) and Weblogs, Inc., to name a few. read more

This may well have been doing the rounds among other publishers, so apologies if this is old hat to some, but today I received an email from Google offering me £75 of AdWords advertising.

I’m a UK blogger using Google Analytics. The email begins:

Dear Google Analytics User,

As a Google Analytics customer, we know that you care about the quality of traffic coming to your website, so we wanted to introduce you to Google AdWords. AdWords works by placing targeted advertising alongside Google’s search results.

To help you get started with AdWords we’ve sent you a voucher for £75 of Google AdWords advertising. The voucher is risk and commitment free, so start advertising today and drive more traffic to your website.

read more