Nick Denton seems to be on a bit of a publicity tour at the moment as there have been quite a few interviews with him and articles about him online in the past few days. Here is another Questions for… Nick Dention. Here is one of the questions put to Nick:
WSJ: Name two interesting moments in blog-ad history.
Mr. Denton: The first most significant development is Google’s AdSense. This enables small Web sites — like Weblogs — to at least fund some of their costs without having to build an advertising sales force. It provides very good targeting of text ad to content. If there is an item about Palm Pilots, then Google will supply ads about Palm Pilots automatically without any need for manual intervention. For certain topics, the revenues are quite meaningful. There are some Web sites, like a site called PVRblog, all about personal video recorders, that pretty much cover their running costs with Google ads and nothing else. The other development, in the last six months, advertisers like Nike and Audi are discovering blogs and engaging with the medium. I think it shows that blogs can attract innovative, brave advertisers, not just technology advertising, not just performance-based advertising, but classic brand advertising.
