> Its a shame that "affiliate" ads like the ones they let bloggers use have 100X their ROI...
Sounds like an incredible market opportunity.
What are the companies that are building ad marketplaces targeting high performing affiliate bloggers which demonstrate their value better to advertisers, and share a higher proportion of profit with the bloggers?
Are there fundamental issues trying to scale up a business like this? Not everyone can spin their own custom 'sponsership' packages like DaringFireball, but there is a lot of good blog content out there.
I remember seeing some bespoke ad networks in the designer space, can't think of their name off-hand. Had the feel of a high-end web ring, if that's not an oxymoron.
I mentioned this in another post, but I believe this is how most seriously profitable bloggers make their money. They don't go for Google ads, they go for affiliate deals and sponsorship.
It's a smarter way to do it because the adverts are usually far far more relevant to the audience. Nothing annoys me more than generic clickbait advertising ("Release your equity!", "What did these 10 people do to get rich?", etc) which I'm never going to click on. On the other hand if I see a food blog sponsored by e.g. KitchenAid, I might have another look at their mixers.
If you have the readership and a trusting community (or reputation), it's a no brainer. This is how Daring Fireball does it too.
Affiliate links are another good way of subtly making cash - look at people like Ken Rockwell, who was once the de facto "Nikon Guy". His site was (is?) the go to place for Nikon camera/lens reviews. There are no ads on his site, but every damn link is affiliated (and why not?). This is also a very sneaky way for airline reward bloggers to make tons of points: they find the deals, everyone goes through the affiliate links and earns their meager 100 avios, while the blogger makes a tidy referral profit. The guy who runs Head for Points [1] made thousands when the Curve Card was released.
To be fair, the article is agreeing with you. It's interesting that advertising is no longer considered viable for blogs... I thought a fair number of blogs ended up making significant sums that way (e.g. steve pavlina). Isn't that the case any more?
Affiliate and eproducts. A lot of bloggers are against monetizing right off the bat, but if you can drive an audience to your blog then you should be able to drive them to click buy every once in a while.
It is monetized when you get better jobs - better paying or paying the same with more interesting work.
That said, one blogger did tell me his "desk setup" blog with affiliate links made more money than the rest of the blog combined. So throw in a post or two that you wouldn't normally write about.
It's also inherently problematic. Getting "sponsors" to pay you to talk about their product is in direct conflict with becoming/remaining an influencer.
Your audience needs to trust you. If your audience knows you are shilling for someone, they fundamentally can't trust you.
They can no longer trust that you are saying "This is an awesome product!" because you genuinely believe that. Maybe you actually think it's shite, but, hey, you needed to make rent this month. So, whatevs.
I've even seen people on the internet say "I used to read such and such ...until they began getting free samples and the like to support the blog. Then it went to shit and I quit reading."
It's a problem space I've thought about a lot because I blog. I am trying to get my writing supported primarily via tips and Patreon.
If my audience wants quality content it can trust, my audience needs to pay me. If they aren't paying me, "they are the product, not the customer" to borrow a popular phrase.
But selling out my audience so I can eat is not a thing I am interested in doing. It's flies in the face of the very reasons I blog.
Over the years, a lot of quality free content has either gone to shit or gone away. The expectation that good content should exist, but be free, is simply unsustainable.
Quality content takes time, effort and expertise to produce. It needs to pay, or most of the people who are any good will eventually go do something that does pay.
That's just reality.
And then we are left bitching about how there's nothing any good on the internet anymore and where is all the good stuff I remember from the good old days? (A fairly common refrain currently, actually.)
The article is fair enough but how badly can you monetise a blog? forcing me to view two adverts and scroll before I see any content, I really dislike blogs that do this, make a quick buck rather than build an audience over time.
>The only problem with this is putting ads on what people think of as "their" blog. People want to be able to run their own ads on "their" blogs; even if they're hosted with some other service, they want to be the ones making money off people seeing their own content on their own pages.
I don't see why that would be a problem. So you share the revenue with them, which the bloggers are happy to do because you're providing all the analytics and economies of scale they don't have right now.
>A blog is a delivery tool to direct people's attention to places - you can sell stuff via your blog. A successful blog is also a powerful reputation-building mechanism.
Reputation goes down the toilet the moment you start selling stuff on your blog. Affiliate links are the scourge of blogs, because you don't know whether it was an incidental monetization, or whether the blogger thought "How am I going to get this thing to pay by indirectly and inefficiently taxing readers?", scrounging around for some sort of affiliate junk to claim to be over the moon with.
Examples abound of prominent bloggers flushing credibility and reputation down the toilet when they chose the "Sell" route for monetization.
Reputation itself is a bias, though. Some of the worst blogs are the ones where the writer is clearly preening themselves for future employers.
Not only this, but blogging can also be a marketing tool, where you (or a company you're writing for) publish articles not as an end in themselves, but as a way to show you're an expert in a given domain. For SEO reasons, but not only. These blogs don't need advertisement to make money, they are the advertisement. I'm pretty sure nowadays, this is where money is in blogging. If you want to make money as a blogger, I think it's a way safer road than the advertisement-centered approach.
I've seen a few bloggers doing 'sponsored posts' where they ask companies if they'd like an article discussing the company's product(s).
(There is a dark side to that too. Some posts don't declare they're sponsored and are secretly astroturfing/shilling products, so keep that in mind).
There is also affiliate marketing which has been a staple for many bloggers even since the early days. Check out Commission Junction.
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