Blogs advertising
The first commercial use of blogs is the use of the audience for advertising.
The advertising space is sold by the publisher of a free hosting service or specialized networks involving several thousands of independent blogs. The advertising (banners, skyscrapers, etc…) appear on the home pages of the site, on the management interfaces used by the perpetrators and possibly be integrated into blogs themselves. The advertisements may also sometimes be included in information sent (RSS) to individuals wishing to be automatically alerted of updates of the blog in which they are loyal.
It is very close to the financing method used when advertising on community sites hosting personal pages or forums. These actors have often been integrated a blog into their services, as the blog is undoubtedly a competitor to traditional personal pages.
Although recent studies point out that American readers of blogs are individuals rather prescribers and enjoying higher incomes than average, the advertising blogs faces the same problems as the personal pages or forums. The advertising space is generally not of high quality in terms of attention to advertising and the media is highly variable in quality depending on various blogs, which can pose an image problem to the advertiser.
As for personal pages, blogs are categorized by thematic and can theoretically offer advertisers targeting capabilities. In practice, this does not make specific offers to advertisers, because the categories do not correspond to the targeting specifically sought by advertisers and volumes by category are often too modest. The advertising blogs are generally sold in rotation on a hosting site, blog or on a network specialized in blogs.
A priori, the advertising blogs is as difficult as other community spaces. It seems that not only sites specializing in blogs and for whom it is a simple extension of activity, sometimes in marketing their advertising-related blogs. In this case they are sold along with other areas of the sites and sometimes included in the provision of general rotation.
For specialists blogs, marketing seems much more difficult and banners or text ads that appear most often come from adherence to networks sites supports paying for performance such as networks of links or promotional programs’ affiliation.
An individual blog can also be an independent advertising when his hearing permits, i.e. when several hundreds of thousands of page views per month. In this case, the advertising model is very close to that of a specialized press, because the theme of the blog can target a priori the hearing. Blogs receiving such a hearing, however, are extremely rare, especially in the United States of America.