ReadWriteWeb Does Sponsor Posts

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I was a bit surprised to see that ReadWriteWeb published a sponsor post (about the .me domain, which is cool, check out tdh.me /shameless plug), something I haven’t noticed them doing before. This is how they, well, defend it I guess:

[…] we offer our long-term sponsors the opportunity to write ‘Sponsor Posts’ and tell their story. These posts are clearly marked as written by sponsors, but we also want them to be useful and interesting to our readers. We hope you like the posts and we encourage you to support our sponsors by trying out their products.

Right. I’m not sure I like this kind of sponsored post actually, it is too much marketing. I don’t mind thanking sponsors in posts though, as in “thanks to our sponsors, June 2009” or something like that. This? Too much marketing, but at least RWW are transparent about it.

ProBlogger.net Branches Out, Launches Deal Account On Twitter

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ProBlogger.net is launching a blog deals account on Twitter, to pass out coupon codes, discounts, special offers and more. Darren Rowse explains his decision to launch @ProBloggerDeals on Twitter like this:

I’d love to promote everything on ProBlogger but the reality is that ProBlogger.net is a blog that focuses more upon tips on how to blog rather than a blog about products or tools for bloggers.

It’s an account for promotional tweets only, and some of the links on it will be affiliate ones. Rowse is open about that, naturally, and you should be aware of it too. That being said, when he claims he’ll stick to promotions for good stuff, I tend to believe him. After all, Rowse has a great reputation.

Read more about the account, and follow it on Twitter if you’re into that sort of thing. Personally, I keep thinking how much more open and fair this sounds than Perez Hilton including promotional tweets in his ad campaigns. But maybe I’m biased.

How Do You Get RSS Subscribers To Visit Your Blog?

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Oh look, VentureBeat rebranded itself a bit. I hadn’t noticed, despite glancing through all the updates from this blog on a daily basis. I read it through my RSS reader, and that is a problem for the publisher.

We already deducted that the massive footer ads will get you nowhere, unless you can sell them from a fixed price (don’t accept that, media buyers!). That means that you probably want your RSS readers to pop in on your site every now and then.

How do you get your RSS subscribers to visit your blog? Share in the comments.

Google AdSense pushing local currency reporting for many international publishers

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When I logged into my Google AdSense control panel last night I found a new option to have my earnings listed in local currency (UK pounds) from now on.

This has been developing for some time but it’s the first time I’ve been prompted by Google to change to local currency.

What appears to be new is that, once the change has been made, it’s not possible to change back to US dollars (either reporting or payment method). Before, Google had said that “you can still choose to receive payments in US Dollars”.

Does this make any difference to international publishers? [Read more…]

Six Apart and VideoEgg partner on video ads

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Bloggers using TypePad will find it easier to integrate video ads into their content thanks to a partnership between VideoEgg and Six Apart announced today.

Six Apart will offer AdFrames ad units including Twig, which is an ad that stays in the browser window and can be expanded upon mouse over (one of the types of ad I hate, for what it’s worth).

The press release implies that the video units will be available to all publishers, though I’d be surprised if there was no quality control/bar to entry at all. It mentions that “launch partners” include Orbitcast, MediaBlab, Geeks are Sexy, Make Use of and Blog Net News, so perhaps it is fairly selective. [Read more…]

The Ad Heavy Feed Footers

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It was bound to happen, ads hitting the RSS feeds. It’s not even anything even remotely new, popular services such as Feedburner (pre-Google) offered advertising solutions for your feed, and does now too, thanks to Adsense. Other players in the feed sphere did it too, and don’t forget the publishers themselves – adding something at the end of the RSS feed isn’t even all that hard. And I’m not even mentioning the fact that if you put an ad in your blog post, it’ll go right along in your feed.

It makes sense. A lot of us like to read, or at least glance, stories in the feed reader. We might not visit some sites in weeks, despite being regular readers.

Enters the ads in the RSS feeds. Problem is, where there is plenty of opportunity to make it look splendid and great on a website, the feed doesn’t have the same possibilities. Which makes it ugly. [Read more…]

Perez Hilton To Include Tweets In Ad Campaigns

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BlogAds.com CEO Henry Copeland participated on a panel at the OMMA Publishing, and had some Perez Hilton gossip to share. We’ll skip the “new friendlier site” launch rumors and skip to the part where Copeland says that Hilton has six-figure deals to tweet about products and/or services.

Under the agreements, Hilton this summer will post Tweets about the products or services involved for a week on his Twitter feed, which Copeland said has more than 1 million followers. “Perez is a great springboard for anyone who needs a springboard onto Twitter,” said Copeland, who claims that a link by the notorious blogger can send 10,000 to 20,000 new visitors to a site in an eye blink.

This will be linked to ad campaigns on PerezHilton.com, probably sold as a package. Media buyers love that. MediaPost has the full story.

Gawker’s Bloody Miss, A Hit After All?

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I’ve been watching the BloodCopy debacle for some time. BloodCopy is a new blog in the Gawker Media blog network, about vampired. Problem is, it is a big ad in itself, the whole blog is a HBO promo for the TV series True Blood.

There’s disclosure, hidden away in the Gawker Media footer. There’s no “sponsored post” text or anything. The campaign is, at the very least, balancing along the edge of what is deemed OK within the blogosphere.

We’d better get used to it. [Read more…]

Nick Denton Believes In Content

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The king of Gawker Media, Nick Denton, is featured in an interview over at Ad Age. Naturally, a lot of the focus is on advertising revenue and the fact that Denton doomed it last year, and then did well enough after all. While online revenue for a blog network like Gawker Media is interesting, this caught my eye:

If a good exclusive used to provide 10 times the traffic of a standard regurgitated blog post, now it garners a hundred times as much. That should be reassuring to people. The content market is finding its new balance. Original reporting will be rewarded.

Denton then goes on and talks about recent strategic hires to strengthen the voice of the network’s key titles. Content is king yet again, eh?

IAB Releases Social Media Best Practices

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This is good news for marketers as well as companies trying to make money on social media services, sites, applications, and so on. IAB, which is responsible for the de facto standard of online advertising, have released a hefty tome on social media practices. Nick Gonzales of SocialMedia.com writes a guest post on TechCrunch covering this:

As part of a company that makes social ads, I’m excited that the IAB has released a new set of social advertising best practices to help bring consistency to the marketplace, similar to the way IAB standards brought efficiency to online advertising back in the 90’s.

I agree, social media needs some directions when it comes to advertising, and that is IAB’s desk. This could also lead to marketing firms eyeing social media with even more interest, since there is now some sort of guidelines to go by, although that remains to be seen.