I find it interesting to see that MSN Spaces is now adding advertising to their blogger’s blogs. In a way if makes sense – they have 4.5 million users, even if it was just the users themselves who saw the ads thats significant exposure – let alone all the readers.
I’m surprised however not to see much reaction from bloggers about this yet. When I first heard the news I thought that there might be a bit of an outcry from MSN spaces users who resisted the idea of MSN using their blogs to make money for themselves without giving them anything but a free space to write. Perhaps I’ve missed these sorts of blogger’s posts – has anyone seen any? Update: in digging around I’ve now found a few but not as many as i’d have expected.
I’m also a little intrigued by MSN’s business model in comparison to Blogger’s (owned by Google) who used to have their Adsense ads on every free Blogger blog but who removed these ads about 18 months ago for some reason. I’ve always wondered why they removed these ads – Did they just not work? Were bloggers protesting too much? Do the search boxes that they now put on blogger blogs pay more? Or do they hope that every blogger in their program will add their own Adsense ads and blog better and smarter if they give them the chance to earn a share of the revenue.
I’ll be interested to see how this strategy goes for MSN Spaces and am especially interested to see if they offer a paid version where bloggers can opt out of the ads or even a system of sharing revenue on advertising with bloggers using some sort of system like Adsense.
