Winthrop Yu, former head honcho of PC Magazine Philippines led me to this Forbes piece on how specialist blogs are stealing rich advertising from tech media – and I don’t just mean traditional tech publications, but their online counterparts also. In other words, if I were an advertiser, I’d actually see more value in putting ads in TechCrunch and Engadget than in CNET, PC Magazine and its online PC Mag website.
What?! Why the online counterparts? Because the surfing public is smarter now. They use popup ad blockers to get rid of annoying and unwanted ads that cram content into a funnel, you’d be forced to sprawl a 600 word article into 4 pages just to get more page views.
According to the article, Google Search revolutionized advertising, as searching for content in the form of products and services proved to bring in a sense of “demand” from the consumer and contextually targeting advertising to match content. Hence, Google AdSense is raking in tons of cash from just technology blogs alone.
In the “old model” of print, you’d need a publishing house and a printing press as well as your editorial, sales and marketing staff to run the business. On the web, you barely need an office. You don’t even need a sales team as the consumers themselves target ads for you via contextual search.
OK hold on. Before this post grows into a “new vs traditional media” rant, I kid you not, it isn’t. Let’s talk about traditional web sites.
The problem with traditional web sites is that they aren’t very generous with giving the reader a very pleasurable browsing experience. With all the popups and “funneled content” between columns of advertising, it looks almost as if the editorial team is being bullied over by sales, generating tons of banner ad spaces because they’re “virtual” anyway.
With the way blogs are formatted, you have a huge ass column of rich content with contextual advertising on the sides. Basically, that’s it. Why is there no need for so much ad space? Well, the answer is simple if you really think about it. Traditional websites have huge costs to cover. They have a sizable full time staff, an office space, and other offline business components.
On the other hand, all a blog network needs is a server housed in a bomb shelter somewhere, a guy to run it, a blogging platform, and passionate guys who can upload content from time to time.
What I’m really trying to say is that blogs are becoming more attractive advertising platforms because they are more generous with the information they provide in a single click as compared to traditional tech websites that flood the browser with very little content per click to begin with.
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