Somehow I missed this, but “Jason Kottke”:http://www.kottke.org made an “interesting observation”:http://www.kottke.org/04/10/weblog-advertising about popular blogs a few days ago:
Out of Technorati’s top 100 most-linked weblogs**, only 16 don’t feature advertising or are otherwise noncommercial:
Scripting News / Doc Searls / kottke.org / Jeffrey Zeldman / The Volokh Conspiracy / Scobleizer / Lileks / Joel on Software / Rather Good / Joi Ito’s Web / RonOnline / USS Clueless / BuzzMachine / Vodkapundit / Baghdad Burning / Crooked Timber
Lots of interesting observations to be made about the commercialization of weblogs…the quick uptake of advertising on blogs, the increasingly false perception of blogs as inherently unbiased by commercial interests (and therefore preferable to “big media”), the continuing shift from blogging as a hobby to blogging for a variety of reasons, the number of weblogs launching lately that have ads from day one, the demographic difference between the typical circa-2002 blogger and the blogger of today, etc.
There’s more discussion about this “at his site”:http://www.kottke.org/04/10/weblog-advertising. I’d also note that of the Top 100, and particularly those in the Top 50, there’s a lot of heterogeneity. Some are run by single individuals (like “Kottke.org”:http://www.kottke.org), some are group blogs (“Volokh”:http://www.volokh.com, “Crooked Timber”:https://www.crookedtimber.org), some large communities (“Metafilter”:http://www.metafilter.com/) or social movements (“Common Dreams”:http://www.commondreams.org/), while others are commercial enterprises (“Wonkette”:http://wonkette.com/ and the other Nick Denton Mini-Empire[1] sites), and so on. Beyond that, the mix of technology, culture and politics would be worth a closer look, too. I also wonder whether Technorati have changed their criteria a bit: I remember the last time I looked closely at the Top 100 list (a few months ago) the top sites were all from the Suicide Girls porn outfit, but they seem to have largely disappeared from the listing. The presence of sites written in languages other than English, like “this one”:http://nikki-k.jp/n.k/cyber_nyo and “this one”:http://www.interney.net/, seems like a new development as well.
To forestall pointless arguments, I should say that I don’t think taking advertising means your content automatically suffers or your character is corrupted by money or whatnot.[2] But there’s a story here about viable organizational models for blogging. I sometimes think CT is just under a daily-visitor threshold that would change the character of the site. It’s not so much bandwidth costs as our relationship to commenters and so on. The software runs at a just-about-acceptable pace, and the comments threads are generally very good. But more visitors would put extra pressure on all of that. We’re still growing, so maybe we’ll see these changes whether we want to or not. Look out for our crossover deal with Burger King. I’m thinking Whoppers flame-grilled on crooked timbers, with Kids’ Meals containing small plastic effigies of Isaiah Berlin and copies of ‘What is Enlightenment?’
fn1. World’s smallest empire?
fn2. Though I do think your _layout_ does: most of the drop-in advertising methods I’ve seen look like crap.
{ 22 comments }
Mrs Tilton 10.27.04 at 9:13 am
We haven’t quite made it into the Technorati Top 100 yet, and I can’t say I’m in love with the look of the ads on A Fistful of Euros. Still, they help pay for bandwidth. And, if our CFO’s projections for ad revenue growth are correct, we shall all be wallowing in piggish luxury in approximately 270 years.
The thing is, very shortly after we started to include ads, I stopped noticing them. They’re just a bit of the page’s architecture. (Though I hope, for the sake of our advertisers, that readers will not experience the same phenomenon.)
David Weman 10.27.04 at 11:40 am
“The presence of sites written in languages other than English, like this one and this one, seems like a new development as well.”
Noyt true at all. Iranian and brazilian blogs have long had a healthy presence, one or two often in the top ten.
Hugo 10.27.04 at 11:48 am
I’m interested to know just how much a well-read blog (such as Sullivan’s, for instance) would actually make in advertising. Anyone have any idea?
Russkie 10.27.04 at 12:53 pm
I didn’t realize that I. B. had much of a following here aside from providing the catchy blogtitle.
Ted Barlow 10.27.04 at 3:44 pm
I don’t know about Sullivan, but Atrios has a link on his page to his advertising rates. You could make a pretty good guess.
Kieran Healy 10.27.04 at 5:19 pm
Didn’t Sullivan raise ~ $80k by appealing to his readers to Send Money Now?
Ben Hyde 10.27.04 at 5:28 pm
Curious that my first thought as I started to read this was to recall the old factiod that you can diagnosis a commercial site by the scarcity of out bound links from it’s pages; i.e. that it’s pages are a bit of a fish trap.
I wonder what the absence of advertising says about a site. Certainly something about it’s costs and sponsorship is revealed by the absence of ads.
Will we see sites adding ads, much as some commerical sites added outbound links, as they seek some kind of legitimacy?
Anthony 10.27.04 at 6:23 pm
I don’t believe that anyone really thinks political blogs are “inherently unbiased” – part of the beauty of political blogs is that they are biased. That being said, I think they’re less susceptible to being biased by their advertisers, as people read political blogs partly for the biased view they provide.
I haven’t looked into ads for my blog, but I understand that the common way to place ads is for a blog to sign up with an ad aggregator, and for advertisers to choose which blogs to advertise on. So advertisers on blogs are more likely to be like the NRA in terms of effects. The NRA’s money doesn’t make a congressman pro-gun, it comes because the congressman is pro-gun. Similarly with advertisers who care about the politics of the blogs. An outfit like George Soros’ Quantum Fund wouldn’t advertise on CT to try to sway CT; rather, the Quantum fund would advertise on CT because CT and George Soros have similar political beliefs.
anon 10.27.04 at 10:08 pm
How the hell is Joel on Software noncommercial? He’s got big text adverts for his software at the bottom of every page!
Scoble is paid by Microsoft to publicize their technology. He claims the page isn’t approved by Microsoft and is personal, but I don’t believe it for a second, because Microsoft is known for astroturf.
ArC 10.27.04 at 10:48 pm
Chiming in to say that I too thought Joel On Software was in large part an ad for his company. Hell, he cites it as part of their marketing strategy.
Jackmormon 10.28.04 at 5:23 am
Warning–long ruminative post.
Billmon decided not to use ads. I think that facing the financial costs of his hobby while watching kos get public flak for his Fallujah comments might have precipitated the demise of his blog. If I weren’t still so unhappy about the demise of the Whiskey Bar, I’d say that it was another instance of the self-destructive puritanical streak of the left. From a more objective position, I can say that ads make what was a private or underground communication much more public. The recently unmasked Atrios, for example, has become a public figure, largely because of his ability to raise dollars. In my opinion, Billmon was the better writer, but Atrios was willing to assume a public identity.
I guess what I’m worried about is that highly frequented underground blogs like Billmon’s will tend to fold under the pressure of the public commerical forum. Yet I do recognize that such is the fate of most personalized, contrarian literature in any medium or century. What was private, and became popular, has a way of becoming public, although the costs never exactly do.
John Quiggin 10.28.04 at 6:22 am
We need to get cracking on our line of mugs and T-shirts!
eschaton 10.28.04 at 8:28 am
Sully’s advertising rates:
1 week ($400)
2 weeks ($725)
1 month ($1300)
http://www.blogads.com/boetvmbpmdpn/andrewsullivanblogads/advertise
Martin Wisse 10.28.04 at 8:53 am
A Fistful of Euros has ads?
Martin Wisse 10.28.04 at 9:17 am
On a more serious note, I personally haven’t sought ads for my own sites (Progressive Gold or Wis[s]e Words because a) I don’t need them to pay for my blog upkeep, having just a fraction of the visitors of say Atrios and my monthly costs are $7.99 for a website I would have anyway. and b) I don’t like to get money for something I do as a hobby.
I do not fault those who do choose to have ads to keep the cost down or even because they’d like to make some money off their venture, but I do dislike those who, like Sullivan are asking for greatly inflated sums of money directly fromt heir readers, or those who just seem to blog in order to attract ads…
freddie 10.29.04 at 2:14 am
I am delighted to report that with a number of large grants from generous donors, I continue to maintain a free blog, without ads, and without popups, at
http://www.GoodShit.phlap.net
the site is for the discriminating and sophisticated and thus I do not garner a huge amount of hits daily but I do get a decent amount and many many return hits throughout the day.
Gary Farber 10.29.04 at 3:01 am
As an utterly trivial note, I’d not count Lileks’s site as without ads, because he does advertise and sell his own books. (And I can’t see anything possibly wrong with that, to be sure.)
On my own humble site, which does not appear on the Technorati Top 100 Most Linked (though it does appear at #31 on the Blogstreet equivalent list), the Google ad contract strictly forbids sharing any monetary information, but I’ll mumble that while it’s under three figures per month, it’s not so tiny as to be invisible to my budget, either. Blogads I’m tending to make a huge ~$30/month, give or take. So, altogether, not remotely close to a liveable income, but more than enough to buy slightly higher quality gruel.
John Quiggin 10.29.04 at 5:06 am
If everyone is paying full price, Sully would be making about $4000/week, which is pretty impressive. I’d guess, though, that a lot of discounting goes on.
jonathan briggs 10.29.04 at 3:12 pm
I decided to run ads on one of my blogs. I don’t think it will make me rich. My blog however supports my teaching and I was interested in the contextual content that the ads provided. My students have found some interesting products and technologies because of the ads.
jonathan briggs 10.29.04 at 3:13 pm
I decided to run ads on one of my blogs. I don’t think it will make me rich. My blog however supports my teaching and I was interested in the contextual content that the ads provided. My students have found some interesting products and technologies because of the ads.
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