Why Ads In Feeds Matter

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Why Ads In Feeds Matter

Advertisers and marketers have found the blog world. I bet that at least $3mm and maybe as much as $5mm in advertising will be spent in the blog world in Q4 and that doesn't include adsense. With adsense, its obviously much higher.

But the vast majority of that money will go to ads on sites. That makes sense because advertisers are used to buying on sites. They've been doing that for years. They may be just getting used to blogs as a viable advertising medium, but they certainly understand what a banner is and how to serve one onto a web page.

But here's the problem with focusing on the blog page. Less than half of all my impressions last month happened on my site. I delivered about 300,000 ad impressions in September. Over 60% of them were in my feed. That's right, sixty percent.

And think about who that 60% represents. It's not the people who are typing Allen Iverson email into Google and visiting my post on Allen Iversion (something that happens a fair amount on my blog since I am the fourth link down on that search term).

It's the people who read enough blogs everyday that they need a feed reader. It's the people who like my blog enough to subscribe to it. It's the people who read it regularly. In short, its my core audience.

If you want to reach them, you have to be in the feed. Ads on sites are nice. But if you want to reach the heart of the blog world, you gotta be in the feed too.

Comments (9) | Posted October 11, 2006 in Venture Capital and Technology

Comments

tell that to facebook. now that you can import your blog, i noticed that ads are mysteriously removed from those feeds. instant content theft.

Posted by: jeremy | Oct 11, 2006 9:38:24 AM

Interesting. I read most blogs, including yours, from Bloglines and the advertisements don't show up, which is no small part of the reason that I use it.

Posted by: Chris Kerns | Oct 11, 2006 9:40:08 AM

Anybody working on standard to extend RSS and ATOM for ads?

Posted by: Hu Dou | Oct 11, 2006 9:54:47 AM

Fred -
But if you look at the percentage of people who read content via RSS as a whole, and then the percentage of content that forces you go back to the site (like most MSM does), it's a very small piece of the whole pie, right? I understand if as an advertiser I want to reach YOUR audience I better add RSS to the mix. But if as an advertiser I need serious reach (as most do), I am unlikely to ever get to ads within feeds -- in fact if you look at most of the growth in online advertising it is still actually happening in search/adsense, as opposed to even cpm/display ads.

So I think ads in feeds matter for those sites who have significant portion of readers within feedreaders and who serve up entire content within feed -- so probably for technology/web 2.0 stuff right now.

For large reach objectives, there are still probably significantly better alternatives.

Posted by: AlFromChicago | Oct 11, 2006 10:14:27 AM

I hope the advertising on blog trend continues, for the sake of my bank account. I'm just starting a website called www.ideatango.com (not a blog), but I'm hyping it up with my personal blog at www.bryandaigle.com. I've heard of people quitting their startup business solely to focus on writing their high-income blog. We'll see.

Bryan
At ideatango.com we empower users to create change and profit from their ingenuity.
www.myspace.com/bryandaigle

Posted by: Bryan Daigle | Oct 11, 2006 3:33:26 PM

Another reason why ads in feeds matter is that they may be a disincentive to subscribe to your feed...

Posted by: Andrew | Oct 11, 2006 4:01:32 PM

Fred,

Thanks for pointing this out. I have also thought about this and have come to conclusion that ads need to get into the feeds also, otherwise there is no point in advertising. As the days go on, more and more people are going to use feed readers for reading blogs.

Though I have to admit, as a reader I will find it annoying. So extra care needs to be taken to ensure that the ads are non intrusive like Google's

Posted by: Balaji M | Oct 11, 2006 4:18:43 PM

Speaking of advertising opportunities beyond AdSense, when are we going to see an ad network for widgets? Google doesn't allow you to put Adsense code in widgets because they can't control where those ads are going to show up.

Seems like an opportunity for somebody.

Posted by: lawrence coburn | Oct 12, 2006 4:33:06 PM

Seems like an opportunity for somebody.

Posted by: lawrence coburn | Oct 12, 2006 4:33:36 PM

A VC

Musings of a VC in NYC