Some thoughts on Performancing Partners

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Performancing came up with a new price for advertising on this blog yesterday, and managed to sell a spot for me. They’re selling it at $25 per month, which I think is reasonable. I get 70% of that, or $17.50. Sounds like a fair deal to me.One thing I am a bit disappointed about is that with the advertising I bought on another blog, the blogger has moved the ad below the fold, after I paid for the advertising. This is a bit disappointing, and I’ll be keeping a very close eye on the performance of the ad. So far, in about 48 hours, it has had about 1300 impressions, with a CTR of around 0.93%, this means that I would have had about 11 new visitors in the last 2 days. If this keeps up it will have been a worthwhile investment. (I did get in at $15 a month, before the price for that blog was put up to $25, so that’s good too)

Speaking of price rises, it will be interesting to see if I get next months advertising on that blog at the $15 I paid this month, or the new $25. Considering that it’s an auto renew thing, I hope they don’t automatically charge the new, higher fee to my credit card.

I do find the prices they’re charging for particular blogs to be interesting, too. This blog, with a PR4, alexa anywhere between 30,000 and 100,000 is the same price as the blog I’m advertising on, which is a PR6, and alexa today of 11,000 (averaging around 30,000).

I wonder whay they’re using to determine the prices. I’m assuming that they’re using ad impressions and CTR on the performancing ads we’ve placed on our blogs. This might be why the prices are varying wildly at the moment, until they get a sufficient data pool from which to analyse statistics.

Please, I beg you, take my free stuff

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I wrote earlier today about the idea of an unspoken contract between a content creator and consumer, which illicited an interesting response from the fool, suggesting that content consumers don’t owe the creators the right to ask them to turn off ad blockers when visiting their sites.

It’s got me thinking a bit about the whole model we, as content creators, are running. I think it goes something like this:

I’ll provide you, the consumer, with free content, then I’ll use every means available to me to beg you to read it.

This differs significantly from the real world, where it might go something like:

We’ll make shit, you’ll give us money for it. Got no money? Piss off little man, we have nothing to say to you.

It can be difficult to spot sometimes, but can you see the difference? It seems that there has been a large paradigm shift (always wanted to find a way to work that into a post - w00t!) away from paid products, to us begging people to take our free product.

The problem is, there’s a cost to be borne somewhere. The consumer doesn’t want to pay for the content, it costs the producer time and effort to create it, so who pays?

Advertisers. All the ads you see splashed all over any given blog are the bloggers way of trying to recoup something for the time and effort they put in, whilst still making the content available for free to the consumer.

Is this any worse than creating websites designed to enlist AdSense clicks? Or any worse than a cloaked affiliate link? I would think not.

So next time you fire up your ad blocker, give a thought to what you think the content on the blogs you read is worth. If you think it’s worth the creator getting that extra ad impression, so they can be compensated for their efforts, turn the blocker off. If you don’t think the conent’s worth you turning off the blocker, maybe the blog’s not worth visiting anyway.

Click and Comment Monday - WTF?

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So I get these comments here from time to time on a Monday, something to do with something called “C & C Monday”

“So what is this C & C Monday?”, I hear you ask. Well, I’m glad you asked, because I didn’t know either until I decided to go off and find out what these rather pointless comments were all about.

Apparently, it’s some sort of love in, where you go to someone’s blog, click five of the links in their toolbar, and leave comments on them.

Now I’m no grouch, and I’ve expounded the virtues of letting other bloggers know when you appreciate their work on more than one occasion, but this all seems a little pointless to me.

Unless you’re prepared to spend some time reading the blog in question, you’re not going to be leaving comments of any value. Take for example, the comment left here by Cybercelt from advertising for success. The comment suggests to me that I try to open a dialogue with my readers. Now anybody who’s read this blog on an even semi-regular basis, will know that I personally reply to virtually all comments here, so I’m not sure of the point of the advice.

How far away from spam are these comments? I’m not sure, but they’d have to be pretty damned close.

The contract you have with your readers

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I’m still ploughing my way through the excellent book, Money For Content and Your Clicks For Free: Turning Web Sites, Blogs, and Podcasts Into Cash (aff). Last night I came across an interesting section about the contract you have, as a content provider, with your readers.

Without realising it, we all have some sort of contract with our readers. A contract comes into play wherever there is an environment where any sort of exchange is made.

In the blogging world, it’s probably something as simple as “I’ll provide you free content, if you pop by once in a while and look at my advertisers ads.”

Where this contract can get blurry, is when people use things such as ad blockers, to reneg on their end of the contract.

There still seems to be some people using the web who have the mentality that all content should be free (of ads). This is a confused throwback from the saying that emerged in the early nineties: “Information is meant to be free”. This term has been bastardised from its actual intentions, which were that information should be available to all, not necessarily free of cost.

Where these people are confused is that it actually costs the content producer something to provide that content. Either time, money, maybe their marriage, who knows? But one thing is for sure, it didn’t appear on the web out of the deep blue.

So is a person who uses an ad blocker when they come to your site breaking the unwritten contract you have with them? I don’t know, but the author of the above-mentioned book tackles it by having a contract on his website. Now I’m sure nobody actually reads it, but I’m wondering whether it’s such a bad idea to have something like this:

• I understand that making an income from this is a privelidge, not a right.
• I will strive to only run ads that are relevant to the audience.
• I will not gate off my main content to paying members only. I understand that not everyone has money to spend, and can contribute in other ways.
• I wil always remain within the boundaries of ethical behaviour, and I will let my conscience be my guide.

In return, we might ask something like this of our visitors:

• You will respect my intellectual property, and acknowledge my sole right to determine who it will be used and distributed.
• You understand that content is not actually “free”; someone has to put their time, effort and or money into actually creating and distributing it.
• You will not use an ad blocker on my site
• You understand that you don’t have right to free content on the net.
• You will always remain within the boundaries of eithical behaviour, and will let your conscience be your guide.

I think if we all took a step back, and showed some appreciation to the providers of the content we consume, the providers would be more willing to make their content available for “free”, and there’s be more content for us to consume.

Buying Advertising with Performancing partners

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Well I’ve taken the plunge and purchased a months advertising on a blog through performancing partners.

I bought advertising on a blog with a $15 price tag for the month, which I reckon was an absolute bargain, as the blog in question has a PR of 6, and a 3 month average alexa ranking of around 30,000.

One trap for young players is that the ads will auto renew, so if you want to only run your campaign on a particular blog for one month,you’ll want to watch this.

I’ve set the ad to direct traffic to a passthrough page which does an auto redirect to this blog, so I can track the traffic stats more accurately.

The sign up process was very straightforward, and I received confirmation that the ad had been accepted by the advertiser within the hour, although I assume that this will vary from blog to blog.

The ad is up and running now, so I’ll get back to you at the end of the month and let you know how it performs.

One thought I have had with the pricing set so low for this type of advertising, it looks like a good avenue for advertising affiliate landing pages. With a set price for a month, you’ll be in for no nasty AdWords bill surprises. I’ll look into this later today.