Blogcritics The critical lens on today's culture & entertainment
I want to take a moment and commend Henry Copeland and Blogads for doing what a year ago looked impossible: turning blogs into a viable advertising medium. When Blogcritics was getting off the ground 14 months ago, the notion that blogs could generate traction enough to interest advertisers was viewed as highly unlikely at best. Yet they have done exactly that. Congrats!
Mediapost has noticed:
- When popular new media formats emerge it usually doesn’t take long for advertising to follow, so it’s not surprising that the rapid proliferation of Web logs – a.k.a blogs – is establishing a new advertising marketplace.
Blogs, online’s niche media format du jour, are chronologically structured logs of text and images published to the Web with easy-to-use software tools. The segmentation and abundance of blog content (think anything from the naval-gazing minutiae of a teenage girl’s life to the practical punditry of a tech firm CEO) is fueling a new form of online advertising.
“Everybody needs to do a bit of guerrilla marketing, and blogs qualify as that,” asserts Henry Copeland, CEO of Blogads, a blog-exclusive ad network launched in August of 2002 by newspaper and magazine website publisher Pressflex.
The American Civil Liberties Union, pop artist Coop and spam blocker Messagefire have placed ads on the network’s blogs. Advertisers buy sponsorships of specifically chosen blogs for blocks of time rather than on a CPM basis, and ads can be updated regularly.
