Advertisers including Paramount Pictures, The Wall Street Journal, and The Gap are successfully reaching niche audiences for a fraction of the cost of traditional advertising and a handful of bloggers are earning six-figure incomes from their blogs. Why aren’t more advertisers and bloggers getting together? Fear, ignorance and the knowledge that a lot of pioneers got shot.

Advertising on blogs is not like buying a minute on the Super Bowl says Henry Copeland, founder of Blogads, which matches advertisers with blogs. Successful blogs are edgy, have a sense of humor, and are recognized experts in a narrow niche. Blog audiences look at traditional ads, like “Click here, get 20% off,” and say “screw this, I’ve seen it everywhere,” Copeland says.’ Read more at Blogs are a Good Buy for Advertisers but Fear and Ignorance Keep Media Buyers Away

Clickz has an interesting study into the rise of micropayments which might be of interest to some bloggers. My experience of blogging is that its hard to get much in the way of big payments in one’s income stream but that one way forward that many of us are exploring is to generate many small payments which all add up to something more substantial. If you could get each person who visits your site to pay (whether directly or via advertising) a few cents – over time it would add up. Micropayments in my opinion could be the way of the future and are a particularly relevant topic for ProBloggers. The article reads:

‘A study of 1,112 Americans aged 12 and older, conducted by Peppercoin and Ipsos-Reid, found 17 percent of survey respondents saying they’d use a non-cash form of payment (credit, debit or charge card) for purchases under $5. That percentage, according to the pollster, equates to some 37 million Americans.

“In the physical world, we were surprised to see how much value and benefit consumers realize from using credit cards. They want to use them for their everyday purchases,” Perry Solomon, VP of strategy and co-founder of Peppercoin, told ClickZ Stats. “Specifically, they want to use them for the everyday purchases that they make many times a month, such as for coffee, fast food, vending and parking. This shows that consumers feel comfortable with the speed, convenience and security of electronic payments.”‘ Read more.

Online expenditure on Advertising is expected to continue to rise according to this report:

‘U.K.-based media research firm ZenithOptimedia expects the growth of Internet ad expenditures to outpace other media worldwide, while advertiser confidence holds steady.

Internet advertising has accounted for 3.5 percent of display advertising revenue this year, compared with 3.2 percent in 2003. ZenithOptimedia expects it to account for 3.7 percent in 2005 and 4.0 percent in 2006. By contrast, television leads other media in 2004 with a 37.6 percent share, followed by newspapers with 29.9 percent, magazines with 13.5 percent, radio with 8.8 percent, and outdoor with 5.3 percent. Global Internet advertising leads only cinema, which holds a 0.4 percent share.’

Read More at
Study: Growth in Worldwide Ad Spend Led by Internet

This is yet another pointer to the fact that blogs are positioned nicely to be an income earner – the big challenge is to find advertising tools that help turn potential advertisers in the direction of Bloggers as well as more established web sites.

‘Kanoodle, provider of sponsored listings for search results and content pages, today announced the launch of BrightAds™, a self-service tool for small- to medium-sized content publishers that will enable them to run Kanoodle’s content-targeted sponsored links on their sites. With the launch of BrightAds, Kanoodle enters the market of competing against Google AdSense to secure small and medium sized publishers.

A unique benefit of BrightAds is that it maps ads by “topics” rather than keywords, which prevents core keyword mapping challenges and provides publishers with ads that are more relevant to their site’s content. This protects the editorial integrity of publishers’ sites, ensuring that the ads appearing on each page are directly related to the context of the reader and are not dependent on arbitrary keywords.’

Read More at Search Engine News Journal » Kanoodle BrightAds Challenges Google AdSense

In the finance segment on the ABC (Australian National) News tonight there was mention that the last quarter had seen advertising in Print and TV media have a down turn. Correspondingly there was an increase in Online advertising for the same period which has to be heartening news for those of us exploring online revenue streams.

Free Webmoney has posted a great list of resources for people wanting to explore online advertising options. Its a good starting point on a variety of different topics.

FindWhat has just started their own advertising system similar to that of Google’s Adsense program. Clickz.com has the story and writes:

‘FindWhat.com today debuted AdRevenue Xpress, an automated distribution partner program targeting small to mid-sized businesses. The distribution method is similar to Google’s AdSense, but it uses category- or keyword-targeting, rather than contextual targeting.

The program allows smaller partners, through a step-by-step set up process, to add a search box which returns ads from the FindWhat.com Network. Alternatively, publishers who want to display ads on their site directly, rather than via a search results page, can choose a FindWhat category and display ads from that category.’

So the ads served by this system are not contextually based (so you might be able to run them along side Adsense ads if they look sufficiently different to Adsense format ads). The other difference in the program is that AdRevenue Xpress gives publishers the options to put their earnings back into the system to advertise their own sites – with a 10% discount! This is an attractive feature and something I’ve often wished I could do with Adsense. It will be an interesting system to watch and I’d be very interested to hear from anyone out there who decides to give the AdRevenue Xpress system a go.

‘Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising models, which compensate networks or their affiliates each time a user clicks on a link, were always considered to be something of an honor system. But new data coming to light this week reveals that PPC fraud is far more significant than many industry observers would have imagined.

The data provides a rare public snapshot into a segment of the industry that is controlled and rarely disclosed by companies that manage their own proprietary databases. And while a big player like Google, for example, does not disclose its fraud rates, the problem is significant enough that Google underlined it in its IPO filing with the Securities and Exchanges Commission as a potential risk that investors should worry about.’

Read More at Pay-Per-Trick: Half Of All Ad Clicks Deemed Fraud