Advertising In Blogs – Survey

Tris has posted about an Advertising in Blogs – linking to a survey that Qumana did of bloggers. The survey only had a pretty small sample size so you’ll not want to take it as ultimate truth – but the results are interesting. They found

• 37% of bloggers had ads on their blogs and 22% had ads in their RSS feeds
• 85 (ish) % of those with Ads use Adsense – a figure that we found when we did our last poll on the topic of income sources for bloggers also
• 34% of bloggers who don’t participate in advertising do intend to sign up for an advertising program of some sort

I won’t go through all the stats – you can read them here – but I do find it an interesting topic to examine.

One of the themes that Tris and Arieanna seem to be picking up on and arguing is that many bloggers don’t use Adsense or other advertising systems because of the complexity of adding them to a blog.

My initial reaction to this argument was one of skepticism – this comes from me seeing some of the most technically inept people I know (including me a couple of years ago) working out how to ad Adsense to their blogs.

On the other hand I think they might actually be onto something – those of us who have been blogging for a while do tend to forget what it was like in our early days. While I now confidently make changes to my Adsense code and can find the spot in my templates to add other ad programs – I know from the emails that I get that many people don’t even know where to begin with tweaking the back end of their blog.

Of course anyone who reads the post by Tris will read between the lines where their critique of Adsense and other Ad systems is going. In fact you don’t really even need to read between the lines – I suspect where it’s all going is staring us all right in the face in blue and yellow!

It will be interesting to get a look at what they’re up to in the coming weeks.