Paul has an interesting article on Harvesting his High Page Rank. He has a travel site with a page rank of 5 that he sells text links on. However he has a novel approach to how to determine which link is first in the list – he auctions the top spot off using a ‘last in auction’. If you want to be on top spot you simply bid another $1 and you get top spot – til someone else bids another $1. Interesting system which appears to be working if you check out the long list of sponsors he’s got (currently 38). You can sign up for a link here. Paul explains the system:

‘My solution? A last-in auction. Whoever is willing to pay to be number 1 gets the slot — everyone else gets moved down. If someone doesn’t like being #2, they can pay again to be #1. The price doesn’t change, just $1 — It’s determination, not finances, that keeps a link at the top. And, as an added incentive, the #1 link is guaranteed to be on every page, #2 on down may or may not show, depending on how long the article is. How long does a dollar keep an advertiser on top? Five minutes or five days, depending on how long it takes for someone else to pay a dollar.’

I just bought a $1 link – interested to see if it brings any traffic.

Blog Kits have just released 7 new sizes of banner advertising – designed specifically for bloggers. Whilst I’m surprised that they haven’t gone for some more standard sizes (eg 468 x 60) which would allow them to be used as alternative ads for Adsense, there are a few nice sized buttons there for sidebars.

I might just have to give some of them a go in the weeks ahead.

The Mobile Technology Weblog is another blog that is using Ebay to help them earn an income from their blog by selling advertising space on it. They are currently up to $41 for a 120 x 90 banner (for a month) after a couple of days of the auction. I’m sure others have done this (I’ve definitely seen non blog type sites do it) but its a good idea and worth a try.

‘TJ and I came up with a pretty cool idea recently, which I think is unique – but I’m sure we’ll find someone who’ll claim it’s been done before :-)

Why not auction off advertising space on blogs on eBay? So I placed an ad this morning to sell off the ad space you can see on the top right of the blog for a month. You can see it – and bid on it! – here.

It’s a bit of a punt, but if it works, it could be a great way to connect advertisers with bloggers, which is what eBay does so well. And if it enables bloggers to be rewarded for their work, I’d be delighted.

If you’re a blogger reading this, I’d really appreciate a link to this post – the more people see it, the more likely it is to work and the more likely it is that it’ll start something big for all of us.’

I was actually pondering the other day whether an auction type version of BlogAds might be a viable method of selling ads. For example if instead of bloggers setting their prices (guessing at market value) and hoping that an advertiser comes and pays that much – if Blogads added the option to have an auction for your ad space. This way advertisers would have a little more say in the setting of the price as we as the blogger would find the true market value of our sites. Just an idea – one that I hope who ever uses it will give me 10% of the earnings from!

Right Wing News has done some estimates on what they think some of the bigger blogs are making from Blogads on a weekly basis. The estimates are rough and they admit they are probably over estimates as Blogads do take 20% in commissions and it doesn’t take into consideration advertisers buying long ads (which are usually discounted) and it wouldn’t take into consideration the free ads that some bloggers use. On the flip side of course, these numbers are conservative in their overall earnings as many of them use other advertising also such as Adsense, affiliates, private ads etc.

Having made all those disclaimers this is an interesting analysis. Here are the top 10 on this list of estimates of Blogads weekly earnings (check here for their complete list):

Daily Kos:$6800

Talking Points Memo: $2900

Instapundit: $2125

Eschaton: $2000

Andrew Sullivan: $2400

Hugh Hewitt: $1500

Political Animal: $1430

The Smirking Chimp: $1350

Wonkette: $1150

Political Wire: $1100

Another blog revenue stream has been announced – this time its BlogMine.com whose motto is ‘Content, Clicks Cash!’ Their main service is ‘GoldRush’.

‘GoldRush makes you money. It analyzes the blog’s content and provides text ads targeted to your content and your audience. No need to worry about irrelevant ads showing up in your blog and feeds.’

Once again – it is a contextual system which rules out those of us using Google’s Adsense.

This is the third such system to be announced in the last month or two. We’ve already seen two very similar services announced in Chitika and Crisp Ads. I’m yet to really see many bloggers using them and have not heard any tales of success (or failure for that matter) on them.

It seems that there is yet another contextual advertising system being launched that is specifically targetted at bloggers. It is called Chitika and promises to motetize your blogs and your feeds using contextual ads. They offer all the main formats of ads and seem pretty sstandard in terms of design and layout. They pay publishers 30% of any revenue raised from a click on the ads. This sounds low but there is no real way of comparing it to Adsense who does not publish the percentage that they pay out.

It looks quite similar to Crisp Ads – neither of which I can really test without removing the Adsense program from my blogs (Adsense forbids you using any other contextual advertising on your blog concurrently with it).

As always – I’m keen to hear your opinion on this ad program – write us a review and we’ll publish it with plenty of links back to your own site.

I’m interested in the launch of a new program that will attempt to match bloggers with adertisers – BlogKits. It seems to be what I’ve been suggesting is needed from what they write in their News Release:



‘“Until today, bloggers primarily embraced tools such as Google Adsense or Henry Copeland’s BlogAds.com to generate revenues,” said Jim Kukral, Blogging Guru and founder of BlogKits.com. “While both excellent solutions, the fact remains that both of those tools rely on a blogger’s ability to generate large amounts of web traffic for any real income opportunities, leaving 99% of all blogs out in the cold.”

The BlogKits BlogMatchTM Network will allow all blogs, even those without high levels of visitor traffic, the no-cost opportunity to earn revenues in a multitude of ways by matching them with advertisers/marketers that care more about reaching the right target audience, not just necessarily the biggest one, and not necessarily through only traditional methods like banner ads.’

What they seem to be offering is a listing of blogs for Advertisers and Marketers to approach for a variety of sponsorship arrangements. As a blogger they invite you to submit your blog to the network by filling out a form. Then you add a small piece of code to your blog so that they can track your traffic levels and I guess will contact you if an Advertiser wants to develop some sort of partnership arrangement. Seems pretty simple and worth a go.