Feet up! : blogging/adverts

This week's adverts. Week 43 2005.

Feet up! has 0 adverts this week.

These are the splendid people currently supporting feetup.org's hosting costs, and Jim's toy and beer budget:

So, what's this entry all about? There's an explanation here about what I'm calling my feed ads and more of my thoughts on adverts can be found in my blogging/adverts category.

Advertise on Feet up! to keep Jim in beer and nice toys.

What's that ad about?

I don't know either! Classic bit of advertising I guess, tease the punters to get some click through and meme propogation. I'm guessing it's a new product or something from Sharp, but if it turns out to be some sort of porn site I'm going to dump the ad.

Nice to see that they've got Swiss Tony writing the text though, Flav's lyrical way with words is wasted on car mechanics.

Blog ads, where next?

Musing with Terje about where to go next with adverts on our respective sites. He's using the infamous Google adSense programme right now, and isn't too impressed with either the relevance of the ads provided or the subsequent revenue. He's getting pretty good traffic, which is increasing rapidly. 25,000 unique visitors last month and on current growth rates probably 70,000 this month.

I'd be tempted to recommend Blogads to Terje, because I like their approach and the fact the you're in control, but Blogads seem to be very focussed on the high traffic political blogs right now, and it's quite possible Terje would get no ads at all.

I think part of Blogads problem (for Terje and me at least) is location, we're in Europe and Blogads appear to be a New York orientated entity. Blogging is possibly less of a mainstream activity in Europe, so the focus here is less on politics and more on technology and other early adopters' activities. Hence a different set of products to sell and a different audience.

What other alternatives are there? From a quick search, I've found RSS Ads and Adbites, neither of which seem to offer anything too exciting though.

Maybe the solution would be to form a small co-operative of small/medium European tech based sites and cut out the middle man by chasing the advertisers directly or at the very least provide a central contact point for them to reach us. A Lazyweb idea or a call to arms? I'm not sure yet.

Blogads hit the Wall Street Journal

Nice stuff (coverage from Onlineblog.com), I've been with blogads for a while and considering that this blog is pretty low traffic and niche focussed I've still had a reasonable number of paying ads from them.

Henry Copeland's (of Blogads) overview of the WSJ coverage mentions that Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of Daily Kos is pulling in $4,000 a month from his ads; then again given that he's getting over 400,000 visitors a week, at that rate I'd be closer to getting $5 of ads per month :-)

I guess the ideal product placement for this blog would be a beer hunting application for Symbian phones that used FOAF and Bluetooth, so if you want to advertise one of those you're looking in just the right place!

Prior art, other posts about blog adverts

As part of my category fiddling, here are a few of my posts which ought to be in the blogging/adverts category, but for various reasons are not.

RSS adverts

Something that isn't included in the standard Blogads setup is a simple way to broadcast your adverts to the large section of your readers who consume your RSS feed and rarely see the html version of your content (and hence the all important ads).

To counter this I've written a simple kludgy Pythonic solution to take my adverts and in association with cron post them into my blog once a week.

When I've debugged and cleaned this up a bit further (there's some big content assumptions right now) and made it a little easier to use I'll post it here (under GPL or Python licence probably) so that other Blogads customers can take advantage of this.

The first output from this can be seen here, I'm considering whether to have a new post every week so I can maintain a trail of adverts through time on this blog or whether just to have a single post that changes every week. I'm opting for the latter approach right now.