Duncan over at the Blog Herald has considered the new blog network being proposed by Pajamas Media (which I linked to a couple of days back). Duncan has taken a look over the documentation that Pajamas Media sent out to interested participants in the program and expresses a number of concerns with what he reads.

It seems that despite some of the concerns that have been raised that many have signed up for the program – Roger posts that over 150 have signed up to be a part of the network.

Duncan questions the legality of the documents sent out by the Pajamas Media team and points out that there is a 3 month exclusivity clause which stops publishers talking to any new advertisers and publishing networks. In a sense what bloggers are being asked to do is take something of a step out into the dark without knowing exactly what conditions Pajamas Media will offer. He goes on to talk about concerns with the secrecy clause in the contract, confusion between the two programs that they seem to be promoting at once and lastly about the right wing political nature of most of the bloggers behind this program and the implications that this might have.

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Jason has a good post critiquing the CPI (Cost Per Influence) advertising that some have been talking about a bit recently. The theory is that some are trying to come up with an advertising system that rates ‘influence’ of blogs and connects this to the advertising rates that they are able to charge because of it.

It’s a nice idea – in theory – but as Jason say my experience is that advertisers are generally pretty smart at working out how influential a blog is by themselves – I’m not sure a CPI program would help them too much to do this. Jason writes it better than I could so I’ll just let him say it (and I’ll get back to packing boxes for our move this week):

‘To be blunt, as I’m prone to be, the CPI concept is appealing to those folks who don’t have the traffic to back up the claim that they are influential or who don’t want to wait till their traffic reaches that level. It also appeals to those who don’t have the ability or time to demonstrate to advertisers that they are influential.

One thing I’ve learn running online media businesses for the past 10 years is that people buy what they like to read. The advertisers in WIRED, Industry Standard, and the Silicon Alley Reporter were the folks who read the magazine and felt affiliated with it in some way.

Advertising is about affiliation more then influence. High-tech advertisers want to be affiliated with Engadget, hip companies want to be affiliated BoingBoing.net. Some day very soon advertisers will catch up with the highly-influential, but lower traffic, blogs folks like Doc, Jeff, Joi, and Kottke (who knows if these fine folks even want ads, but you get my drift).

When they do catch up it will be because of a combination of those folks increasing their traffic and their sales ability, as well as the advertisers finding them. It’s a natural process, and CPI isn’t really necessary to get it done.’

Roger L. Simon has just posted anOpen Letter to All Bloggers announcing that he and a couple of others are going to start a corporate advertising service which will sell ads to advertisers ‘en masse’ . There are not too many details but it sounds like an interesting project. He’s doing the project with Charles Johnson (of LGF) and Marc Danziger (of Winds of Change). If the email for more information is anything to go by the new projects come under the name of Pajamas Media. He writes:

‘Charles Johnson, Marc Danziger and I have been sneaking around over the last few months, trying to turn blogs into a business. We have enlisted some others with names familiar to you with the intention of working in two areas – aggregating blogs to increase corporate advertising and creating our own professional news service.

With respect to advertising, we do not wish to go into competition with Henry Copeland’s BlogAds, which we fully support. (Some of us even have them!) We are working on another model that will sell ads en masse, not blog-by-blog. We expect this model to go live within a few weeks.’

It will be interesting to see what they come up with – as these are some guys who have some serious reach within blogging (two of them were in the top 30 I reviewed a few days ago).

In a big week of changes to contextual advertising Jen posts that Yahoo! are now adding dynamic image ads to their contextual advertising line (original source of information). Things are certainly hotting up in terms of competition between Yahoo and Google in advertising – hopefully publishers will be the winners).

Search Engine Journal has a good post on how to work out how much to charge for text ads on your blog. It comes at a perfect time for me as I’ve had a number of emails recently from webmasters asking how much I charge for links. The article suggests the following criteria might be helfpul to keep in mind as you consider how much to charge:

1. PageRank of Site (poor measurement, but probably still worthwhile)
2. PageRank of Page
3. Site Position in Top 50 Results for Primary Term (TLD)
4. Page Position in Top 50 Results for Primary Term (Page specific)
5. Number of External Links on Page
6. Site Flavor from Google (shows theme)
7. Date of Cached Snapshot of Page (shows spidering frequency)
8. Primary Topic of Page Extracted via Yahoo! API (Then conduct C-Index with target term)
9. Alexa Rank (again, poor measurement, but probably worthwhile)
10. External Links to Site (Using Yahoo! LinkDomain Search)
11. External Links to Page (Using Yahoo! Link Search)
12. Internal Links to Page vs. # of Internal Pages
13. Type of Link (customizable text, directory listing, banner/image, etc.)
14. Location of Link (content section, advertising section, navigation area, footer, etc.)

Read more at Text Link Pricing Criteria

Yesterday Google announced it was going into CPM advertising and expanding opportunities for advertisers to use banner ads – today one of the big banner ad providers, Fastclick, add to their website that they are getting into Text Ads.

Found via Thread Watch

Head over to BlogKits and fill in the survey there if you’re interested in helping them research what blogger think about ads on their blogs. The survey is easy to use and quick (took me 5 minutes) and will help to create a blog ad system that is useful and profitable for bloggers.

Duncan has a great post on DIY Blog Advertising which is well worth the read for anyone who is contemplating finding advertisers for the blogs. In it Duncan cuts through some of the terminology and gives some valuable tips (some of which I’d known a few months ago).

I particularly like Duncan’s advice on setting the price for your advertising:

‘Setting a charge for your advertising is often the hardest part of the process. Everone thinks their blogs is worth millions, and I can tell you that some try to charge that way. There is, however I fine line between charging a premium amount and an amount that it too low.

Last year I was approached by an advertiser who wanted to sponsor the Blog Herald and wanted a whole lot of advertising in return. Massive banners 728×90 banners, exclusive run of site the whole thing. I put forward an offer and I was basically laughed at it. The response was that they could get $1 CPM elsewhere for a similar deal and why would should they pay more here, this despite them being the ones approaching me. Suffice to say it was an interesting lesson, both in that advertising wasn’t worth as much as I’d expected (particularly when you’re talking exclusive rights) and that advertisers can be fickle.’

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Blog Advertising