I’m with you - blogs that are trying to make cash are generally (with some exceptions, perhaps) spending too much time looking at ad stats and not enough time writing content.

-Fruey

Bloggers are often storytellers: your little nuggets of nostalgia shared amongst online aquantainces can be enlightening or fun to read.

I was listening to the radio yesterday when Marguerite Duras was quoted as saying something roughly translated as “It’s a lie to say that writers write for them. I write for the collective you”. If nobody reads your writing, you don’t write. If you’re on a desert island, you don’t write.

Most storytellers aren’t running adverts all over their sites; are bloggers who do make money advertising working harder on the moneymaking or the storytelling?

-Fruey

It’s been an enlightening debate. Good to see you here, hope to hear back on your online ad performance soon.

-Fruey

My most successful have been when using sponsoring/sponsored links. Considering client acquisition costs this method worked out significantly better than Newspaper, radio and television. I will be experimenting over the next months with a sponsor program and I will let you know how it turns out.

This method takes time and something needs to be thinking about the business and its objectives. I think this attitude is not very prevelent in today’s companies.

The niche that your blog is in (tourism, geography, Europe) is a good place for targetted advertising to work quite well. I’m not against it per se.

One interesting thing is how few articles I’ve seen by companies who have really tracked their online advertising and made all their ROI decisions that way. I know there are companies that do it, but very few reveal much about themselves.

-Fruey

I also cannot see a future in the keyword payment structure and I agree it will stop. I am also in agreement about bulk package purchasing and have been both supplier and client. I think the ad agencies will become “smarter” and choose better over time and a good blog will draw higher revenues than the mass.

I started writing my blog because people were continuously sending me emails about how to visit Italy and why things were different. I have since decided to promote Italian products (tourism, wine, foods) and work with Italian companies that desire to penetrate the US market.

The ads for me are more of a learning experience and I try to get them to contribute content for things my readers might like. I am not sure it is actually doing what I desire but seems to be doing ok.

David

The current boom in AdWords - both on Google and on blogs - makes me nervous. I see blogs claiming they come up with tactics to get $9 clicks and stuff like that, but really that’s just piggybacking on what I think is a temporary phenomenon. If you track advertising properly, you’ll notice that buying a click that’s not even a sales lead won’t be worth $9 to anyone soon.

The extra space on non professional blogs is probably what keeps the whole market for pay per click inflated. Clever keyword targetting and SEO tactics are the scourge of Google, so expect them to try to stop it.

As far as your readership vs. Dallas Morning News, I expect they package most online campaigns with print advertising or whatever. Being a pure online player and selling advertising, even well targetted, is a tough way to earn a living.

In any case, I think your conclusion is right: over time these things will work out. Right now, I’m not bothering with any advertising. I’m not in it for the money, and if I were I can think of a lot of other stuff more lucrative than blogging in order to pull in an online income. But just maybe, a blog about what that other stuff is would be a good focus to drive traffic.

-Fruey

I also agree that bloggers are, on whole, losing money. I think this is a question of supply-demand on both the publishing and advertising agency side. On the publishing side there are many, many sites and most of them “non professional” increasing the available number of sites to advertise on driving down prices. On the advertising procurement side there are a limited number of agents giving them greater control over commissions, type of advertising etc. that a site receives. For the blogger this is a double whammy thus most bloggers lose money.

Spam is another problem but I think this will go the road of the spam that we receive everyday in the mailbox, most often, immediately discarded.

I think there will be, in the future, profit margins in blogging. Currently my readership is 10% that of Dallas Morning News. Most of my readers are in a very specific market segment which makes them very valuable to the proper advertiser. The problem is that I could never ask 1K$ for an advertisement as the paper could even though on a per reader basis my site is most likely more effective.

Over time these things will work out. I do not think that business can ever really afford to get involved in the content side except for what already happens in the Pump and Dump message boards for stocks.

Good site!