Follow me on
Twitter

More Information

NEW Expanded Edition

PRESS RELEASES FROM HELL and How to Fix Them
The Traditional Press Release Is Dead! The Made-for-the-Internet Release is News Now.
Buy this Report.

REALITY PR STRATEGY: Everything You Need to Know to Get Free (or Really Cheap) Publicity Now. Before you spend another dime on PR, Buy this Report.

CNET: Yahoo to Launch Blog Ad Network to Compete With Google

CNET reports that Yahoo! will launch a new self-serve ad network "tailored to bloggers and other small Web publishers, a move that homes in on Google's territory."

I have earned exactly $1.32 cents from two years of Google Adsense on this blog. Waa hoo. That's because Google ad layouts are totally inflexible, not to mention boring. Let's hope Yahoo lets bloggers decide where ads will run, and what categories they want to run, or not.

UPDATE: The new Yahoo! service, called ContentMatch, has launched. So now we can have more ads from our competitors on our sites and, as Steve Hall pointed out in Adrants, "even more airline ads placed right next to news items about the latest plane crash." For example, there's an ad for a travel press release service on my blog, along with my ad for my e-book, "Press Releases From Hell and How to Fix Them", which contains the line "The Traditional Press Release Is Dead!", and a link to my article, "Press Releases Are a Colossal Waste of Time". If I paid for the travel press release service ad I'd be pissed off.

Categories: Ad targeting, Blogging and Moblogging, Business Communications, Commentary, News

BL Ochman | Aug 3 05 12:33 | TrackBack (0)

Comments

In fairness, I love Google's adsense and have earned hundreds of dollars per month!

Posted by: Ramon Ray at August 2, 2005 10:47 PM

You _can_ decide where your ads will run, color, size, etc with Adsense, what do you mean?

Google held a Webinar earlier today (5pm PST) for how to increase your Adsense revenue. It was quite informative and certainly would have helped you increase your Adsense revenue if that really mattered.

Still, it will be nice to see Google have some competition.

Posted by: TDavid at August 2, 2005 10:55 PM

Sorry I missed the seminar. As far as I know, you cannot run Google ads inbetween posts; you have to run them in blocks.

I've signed a deal for ad representation for this blog, instead of counting pennies.

Posted by: BL Ochman at August 2, 2005 11:44 PM

You are right. There is a lot of hype about these ad management services from Google and Yahoo, and little tangible benefit for website owners.

My sense as someone who buys keyword ads is that my company is wasting 50% or more of our advertising dollars - as the saying goes. The content matching on Google is definitely not as targeted as it should be, but advertisers are afraid to walk-away, because Google has been the only option for getting your ads broadly distributed across many smaller websites.

The competition should have positive effects on Google and Yahoo's ad management programs, but I wouldn't hold your breath. Going with The Laredo Group is definitely the right choice, if you are serious about generating advertising dollars.

P.S. Your content is solid. I'm coming to your site more and more as a trusted resource. I'll remember to click on some ads next time.

Posted by: Adam Saunders at August 4, 2005 1:12 PM

Email this story to a friend

TrackBacks

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.whatsnextonline.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/2516

Search

Contact: BL (at) whatsnextonline (dot) com
212.369.8312

RSS Feed

blog advertising

About BL Ochman

Blogger, social media strategy consultant to Fortune 500 companies, and sought-after corporate speaker B.L. Ochman heads the creative team of whatsnextonline.com. She also publishes the Ethics Crisis blog for SRF Global Translations

Poll ID 0 does not exist.