Akkam’s Razor

A tweet from Colin DeVroe regarding ads on blogs made me pull and paste the following from a business plan I'm working on… 

Akkam’s Razor has been advertisement free for nearly all of its online life.  After a great deal of thought, that will change. 

One of the areas that I struggled with, besides that of my own financial situation, was what effect the presence of advertising would have on my content and my readership.  Would it add or detract from my legitimacy, credibility, and authority?  Would it drive or diminish traffic?  And how well does advertising mesh with my own personal ethics?

I reconciled these concerns by changing my assumptions about advertising and readers.  My primary ethical dilemma is that for much of the online advertising on blogs, the intent is to somehow “trick” or “mislead” the browser to click on text that is placed and formatted as content, when in fact it is advertising.  When viewing your blog as a brand, seeking to make revenue by “tricking” the reader doesn’t seem to be the best way to cultivate readership.

When thinking about that readership, I wondered who they are.  I know about 5 out of the 100 or so, but who are the rest?  Why are they here?

As far as advertising sources, all indication are that the best approach is to have a diversified mix if advertising products ready.  I intend to use AdSense, AdBrite, Blog Ads, the Philly Blog Ads Network, Federated Media, 1&1 Hosting Referrals, and Amazon Affiliates as my sources.

The changing nature of online advertising also has to be considered.  Nielsen has recently changed their core metric from “page views” to “time spent”.  The SEO industry has already created several mechanisms to game search engines, from tags, cloaked content, automatically refreshing pages, and paginated content and comments, all of which will drive up your page view.  A successful SEO operation should also correlate to more “time spent”, especially if the site’s traffic is driven by great content.  Furthermore, the use of video, audio, and games inline to web pages also influences the time spent graphic (for example, an embedded flash game may take 2-minutes to play, or a song might be 3-minutes long).  So how best to monetize advertising, given those changes?

I noticed a delineation between browsers and readers.  Browsers are more likely to have landed on a post directly via a search engine.  Readers, on the other hand, are more invested.  They most likely will have arrived via a bookmarking service, such as http://del.icio.us, or via a trackback or link from another site or aggregator.  They also might have directly typed in the URL, bookmarked the site locally in their browser, or follow the RSS in their feed reader of choice.  These two distinct situations and the conditions within speak to the necessity of a multi-pronged advertising approach.

Based on an analysis of site usability and search(er) behavior, I have deduced a 5-step tier of consumers, with 4 opportunities for conversion.  They are the Searcher, the Browser, the Reader, the Subscriber, and the Collaborator.  Each of these are distinguished by the mechanism they consume the content as well as what they do with it.  Each of these provide for an opportunity to be converted to a higher level of consumption.  And most importantly, what advertising they are served is dependant on what class the fall into and how likely they are for conversion.

 

 

It is important to state that some type of Google Adsense ad will be present on every page (with Google being the most important arbiter of attention, delivering statistics on the site as a whole seems essential) but the mix of ads otherwise will vary based on the referring source.

The ad mix for all content will consist of ~5-7 slots, with the variety and type differing based on the referral source.

So, for example, a “Searcher” who lands on a post on the blog via Yahoo or Google would see (in the left side bar) some text-link ads and a branding box.  Inside the main content, they would find a Google Adsense box.  And in the right sidebar, they would find another Adsense box, a referral box, and an Amazon Affiliates widget.  The browser would find the Adsense inside the posts replaced with some other type of “branding” advertisement.  The Reader would find that there was no advertising inside the post, and the text-links would be gone.  The subscriber, if reading RSS via a feedreader, would have advertising inside the feed, but when visiting the site would find limited ads, as would the collaborator.

The motivating forces - sometimes in conflict - for a blogger seeking revenue is to cultivate a readership, becoming part of a community, and displaying ads and making money.  The level of engagement required being a subscriber or collaborator is higher than that of a searcher, browser, or reader, therefore, a “freemium” is placed on their experience by reducing the amount of ads, and/or changing the type of ads to emphasize return-visits versus returning to their search engine and going elsewhere.  For other audiences, such as searchers, browsers, and readers, more advertising (and more opportunities for revenue) is reflective of their lower level of engagement.  In essence, utilizing a process such as this along with contextual advertising is the equivalent of micro- or nano-targeting, ripe with opportunity for leveraging behavior-based and nuero-directed advertising.

I think I'll be rolling this out in October…