The future is Online Video Ads or it certainly seems that way.
A turf war is going on right now amongst startups and established companies trying to find the best way to integrate ads into online video content. It’s not an easy trick to pull off and solutions seem be diverse
However, the rewards could be huge with eMarketer predicting online video advertising to nearly double in 2008 to $1.3 billion.
The already dominant player in the field is of course Google’s YouTube. There appears to be nothing concrete at the moment and YouTube seem coy about where their heading on this one (in spite of various wide of the mark rumours). However, it is suspected that we will see clickable contextual text ads at the bottom of video content leading to a full video ad when clicked.
An apparent example is shown on NewTeeVee.
Looks a bit clunky to me - nonetheless I think we can all concede that these things are difficult to get right. Expect to see a comprehensive beta trial….
I was interested to see reference made at Link Building blog to Auction Ads. It’s been a while since I’ve seen their name mentioned and it kind of reminded me to take a closer look at what they do.
So for the uninitiated, here is a quick summary:
How do they work?
“When your site’s visitors click on an Auction Ad listing and take an action on eBay you earn cash. Actions are defined as a Winning Bid, a Buy-it-Now or a confirmed user registration. AuctionAds is committed to paying out a minimum of 100% of eBay commission revenue. See eBay’s affiliate program for details on the payout.”
In theory this should be great for product based blogs.
Payments
“We send out payments the first of every month via PayPal. The payment is for all revenue generated the previous month. There is a $10 minimum for earnings.”
This is always a useful feature for smaller publishers.
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Patrick Gavin is the top man at Text Link Ads and therefore I thought it might be handy to summarise some of his pearls of wisdom, taken from various historic interviews.
Speaking about acceptance or rejection from the program:
“Yes it is a combination of: traffic (derived from Alexa data), back links (from Yahoo’s site explorer), and the theme of your website. PR is not a factor in our algorithm but link popularity is a factor and can cause new sites that don’t have much to not be accepted right away. We do re check sites that were denied in the past every couple of months and invite sites that meet our requirements back in.”
Speaking about how exactly Text Link Ads market their services?.
“We have over 10,000 affiliates and run an aggressive banner campaign on many top websites. We drive a lot of eye balls to our sites and work hard with our site to educate the visitors on our product to give our publishers the best chance of selling ad spots through our marketplace. We do believe most sites can sell more spots by using TLA than flying solo. We do automate the ad delivery and payment process which takes a lot of work away from the publisher which is the key to our service.”
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I think the important thing to note from my experience with Text Link Ads is the very simple interface. Once you’ve set up the code in your blog it’s purely a matter of letting the dice roll. There is the added feature of ad approval by email which offers publishers optional control, but as a rule the whole thing is automated.
My own experience tends to indicate that the take up in your link slots (which can be as many as 10) is gradual. However, the momentum does build and advertisers tend to remain loyal.
Revenues are largely a function of site popularity e.g Page Rank, Alexa etc but there appears to be no reason why each link sold can earn somewhere between $15 and $50, which does add up if you manage to sell out of inventory.
You can get a picture of your potential Text Link earning power by paying a visit to the rather handy Text Link Calculator.
Feedvertising is an option provided by many ad programs. It first started to appear 2-3 years ago and was heralded as the killer ap, for monetising all those burgeoning feed subscribers.
Umm, not sure it’s quite worked out that way. My personal experience of other feed based programs has been rather disappointing in terms of revenue. Further, readers of my content have complained about their intrusiveness.
Plenty of people disagree on this and there’s no reason why Feed Ads might just work on your blog. It’s all about experimentation!
Text Link Ads do offer a slightly less obtrusive Feed Ad service by inserting links into the bottom of RSS feeds
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