Steve has picked up on the story that the Washington Post has launched a service to help marketers find blogs to advertise on. It’s called Sponsored Blogroll.
They are building a network of bloggers to participate. Marketers can browse bloggers in the network and WP’s sales team will sell ads for you. WP and the blogger splits the revenue (no mention of what the split is).
The additional attraction to joining the network for bloggers however is that those participating get a rotating link to their blog on the WP’s homepage.
They seem to be looking for blogs in the fields of Technology, Business, Health, Automotive and Travel at this point.
It’s definitely an interesting system that goes a little further than most other blog advertising systems that I’ve seen (in that it not only makes you money but potentially sends you traffic) and one I’ll be keen to check out.
I’m interested to know how they plan on pricing the ads on the blogs? Traffic, Influence, Page Rank, Blog Size?
Hopefully they’ll say more as the program develops. It appears to be a good idea and if it works it can become a nice little earner for the Washington Post and struggling bloggers :) alike.
Very interesting. Every day blogging is opening new avenues.
Sanjen hit the nail on the head with his comment. Not only is pricing going to be a challenge, but the volume of blog submissions has been very high and it is a lot of information to sort through.
That for the post Darren!
Jeff
I can’t speak of the details about the commercial aspects, but can attest to increases in traffic. My Cash Flow blog at AllBusiness.com was picked up in this program at WashingtonPost.com. For a subtle listing, you can clearly see the increase in traffic.
How are the blogs supposed to be hosting the ads? Javascript?
“It’s definitely an interesting system that goes a little further than most other blog advertising systems that I’ve seen (in that it not only makes you money but potentially sends you traffic) and one I’ll be keen to check out.”
Yes, Darren great news for the bloggers. Will you join? I could see http://www.creative-weblogging.com, http://www.bootsnall.com and http://www.allbusiness.com as beta partners. Interesting.
I think trafficv is more likely to base price on.