Online Advertising

Why this post about online advertising? Well, it's everywhere these days (banners, video, text, ...) and for companies, website owners, blog owners, etc. it's a golden opportunity to reach a larger online audience. The worldwide revenue of online advertising must be enormous (ask Google for example) and no surprise that Microsoft also jumped on this : it's their next big thing! It can be seen as the battle of clicks on the Internet for a lot of money.

From the Interactive Advertising Bureau :

Internet advertising revenues (U.S.) for the first six months of 2008 were $11.5 billion, setting yet another new half-year record that represents a 15.2 percent increase over the first half of 2007. The second quarter of ’08 was up 12.8% over the same period of 2007 and showed a slight decline of 0.3% from the first quarter.

I'm not an advertiser, but for me as a blogger, publishing ad campaigns is a possibility to earn some extra money (really not that much!). In the past I've been contacted by Adhese - a company that takes care of advertising campaigns on blogs - to add my blog to their Enchanté offer. What it actually means is that my blog is periodically picked up by specific marketing campaigns and the only thing I need to do is insert a little JavaScript into my blog to display ads (160x150) in the campaign period. I get paid a fixed amount for each ad campaign. This amount has ranged from 25,- euro up to 60,- euro. A lot more than I could possibly earn with Google AdSense, AdBrite or any other similar advertising company. Last week I got contacted to participate in a research project of the Flanders Business School that investigates the pay-per-post principle. I was simply asked to publish a post on the relaunch of the Quick ’n Toast and Suprême Pepper burger of Quick. Doing some extra research on online advertising, I realized even more that the Internet is really one big bunch of connected clicks and each click may have its price! Big Business! More and more alternative approaches for monetizing links will pop up and I'm curious if and when the big players like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, ... will come up with something new and refreshing.

Another approach is taken by Flidge who tries to be a new advertising marketplace with a slightly different offering. In this blogpost I have as an experiment inserted a Flidge link that leads to Fomble, another TinyUrl website with at least a better looking website that's looking for extra traffic and promotion of their business. Flidge works with embedding paid links in whatever format (it may even not be obvious for a site visitor that it's actually a paid link). It's the publisher who decides how to link it all together, but the publish request needs to be approved by the one who pays for the extra traffic to his website ... So, on the other hand I also wanted to test the other side of the story and I offered a link to my blog on Flidge. Feel free to pick up my Flidge link and earn some money by publishing it on your site/blog!

this blog post is an experiment by uMarket.it