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.
