Ads on the Finnish blogosphere
Popular blogs in the U.S. have their fair share of ads and in my opinion, have done a good job of positioning them on the page without ruining the aesthetics of the site or being too intrusive on the reader - cause afterall, if the readers go away because of your annoying blog ads, you won’t make any money off people clicking on those ads. I use the words “fair share” because I know about the expensive bandwidth/costs, I think it’s great that bloggers can try and subsidize those costs with ads, instead of using a PayPal “tip jar”.
But the “top” Finnish blogs have virtually no ads (excluding small Google Ads) - I wonder why? No doubt this is looked at as a “good thing” by readers of the Finnish blogosphere, remember the good ol’ days of the internet before ads were plastered everywhere? But like I said, effective ads placed in non-intrusive locations are fine, the worst thing that could happen is that most readers simply ignore these ads - I think my eyes have been subconsciously trained to skip over ads, especially Google Ads. Speaking of Google Ads - Does anyone actually click on these things? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Google Ad interesting enough to waste three seconds of my life by clicking on it. But supposedly people are making a few $$’s on this.
But back to ads on the Finnish blogosphere - alot of people are reading blogs, I’m sure there’s advertising money to be made - but maybe Finnish bloggers are afraid to “sell out” and show the world that they’re greedy capitalistic pigs who wants to make a profit from blogging. I suspect that it’s like waiting at a crosswalk in Finland, once one person crosses on red, everyone else will soon follow. Hopefully online marketing specialists (other than the a-holes at Jamba) in Finland will be ready for this, then again, Finnish companies don’t seem to be the most open people towards “alternative” advertising like this. Finns, reading more newspapers and magazines per capita than any other country in the world, already view plenty of ads - maybe companies don’t need to bother advertising on “risky” outlets such as blogs? Dunno.
I don’t know about the companies and how they work out their marketing schemes, but economically speaking ad-based funding for this kind of publishing is about the most efficient there is, especially when it is organized like the Google-ads thing.
You see, if you deal with the company yourself, there is always the incentive to try and please (or excert influence, on the part of the company) the advertizers, which leads to a certain amount of self-imposed censorship. This distorts the information provided by blogs. Google-ads don’t cause this kind of phenomenon, since you don’t even know who it is you are advertizing beforehand.
Some people actually do click on google-ads. I have made some 6 dollars in two months (Whoo-hoo, big buck$$!) from them.
Comment by Tiedemies — Wed, Nov 30th, 2005 @ 3:45 pm
Adblock for Firefox takes good care of me. Basically Jamba got me pissed off enough to use it so I used a wildcard to get rid of all ads that one site uses.
Comment by Hank W. — Wed, Nov 30th, 2005 @ 5:00 pm
Speaking of which, your google ads look like you’re trying to masquerade them as legit content in the YELL sidebar… It doesn’t look intrusive, but as people might click on them without acknowledging them being ads, that’s in fact even more intrusive than any (silent) Jamba ad, in my opinion at least.
The definition of non-intrusiviness should hold that the ads are clearly marked as such and are easily distinguishable from real content.
Comment by Pasi — Wed, Nov 30th, 2005 @ 6:46 pm
Oh, one more thing. Incidentally today is the one year anniversary of my google ads. In the past 365 days my ad revenue has reached whopping 76.83 euros. At this rate I expect to cash in my first hundred buck cheque next spring… And pay God knows how much to the bank in the process.
Comment by Pasi — Wed, Nov 30th, 2005 @ 6:50 pm
I click but dont buy. It’not click & buy but click - click - click - click - click - click - click - buy.
It’s about mindshare. If you dont buy a lottery ticket you dont have a chance to win. If you dont ad your mindshare is flat.
PS. Is “ad” a verb?
Comment by jooo — Wed, Nov 30th, 2005 @ 7:18 pm
People become immune to website advertising over time. A sort of an blind spot. I see the YELL sidebar as advertisements even though it’s not, but it’s so similar to googleads etc. that I sort of filter it through.
Then again, there’s pretty powerful adblock software out there that can wipe out pretty much every ad-related thing in a website. They work pretty nice, but I’ve stopped using them since the ads aren’t that intruding (after you enable popup blocking) since I hardly ever seen them.
Comment by Reko — Thu, Dec 1st, 2005 @ 10:08 am
“Speaking of Google Ads - Does anyone actually click on these things? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Google Ad interesting enough to waste three seconds of my life by clicking on it. But supposedly people are making a few $$’s on this.”
Yes, how else would people and moreover Google make money with them? You must know Google gets a large part of its income from these text ads?
Google Adsense terms of use don’t allow telling specific euros, but I can say many somwhat popular blogs bring US$20-200 worth of monthly income for bloggers. This is a way to cover at least bandwidth and server expenses.
I click Google ads quite often, if there’s an interesting message. And because they’re displayed in Finnish, they’re easy to approach for masses too.
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Comment by dipvlboryi — Wed, Aug 1st, 2007 @ 3:13 am