Crenk

Picture this - you are a blogger. Your traffic is limited so the major ad networks don’t want to touch you. CPM ads yield too little and CPC ads just.. well, they aren’t getting clicked, and if you click them, Google will ban you.

What do you do? Well there’s good news. You can sell ads, especially those popular square button (125×125) image ads on a Pay Per Day basis. Pay Per Day is a new pricing model that allows bloggers to earn money for each day an ad is displayed on their blogs. In other words, if you are the kind of blogger who can’t deal with the issues that surround validating whether clicks are valid or not, or if an impression was actually delivered, pricing your ad inventory on a PPD basis will most likely be the best fit for you.

The Status Quo

There are so many companies that will offer to optimize your ads or analyse the most effective places to place your ads in order to generate a lot of clicks. While I am not knocking any of these services, I believe the PPD pricing model is more simple and far superior because your earnings are predictable and guaranteed as long as you display the ads.

A lot of bloggers currently sell their ad inventory by either placing an “Advertise Here” link on their site. The disadvantage here is that the chances of selling inventory via an Advertise Here” link is wholly dependent on whether a potential advertiser happens to visit your site. Selling remnant inventory through ad networks can be worse if the ad network just delivers untargeted, low paying so called “run-of-network” ads to your blog.

The Way Forward

Okay, now that you get the picture, what is the way forward. Well ideally, you want to sell your ad inventory directly to the advertisers. It is worth noting that the advertisers who are likely to pay the big bucks will most likely want to track the performance of their ad campaigns, so claiming your site generates 10,000 unique visitors a month without an independent affirmation will (most likely) not sway the big money advertiser.

This is where Aductions comes into play. Aductions is a new and cool advertising platform that allows bloggers to sell their ad inventory on a Pay Per Day basis and crucially, it also allows advertisers to find your ad space easily, buy your ad inventory and track their ad campaigns.

In addition to tracking their ads, advertisers can also see the geographic and demographic reports on the ad space they want to buy. This is very advantageous to the bloggers who do not generate a lot of traffic but have a highly concentrated audience from a particular area, or that fit a specific demographic.

Finally, there is an option that allows you to continue monetizing your blog via other networks if an advertiser hasn’t bought your ad inventory. In other words, you can still display Google ads through Aductions. All you need to do is select the 3rd party ad option when creating your ad space.

Oh yeah, this is where it gets really interesting. You can also withdraw your earnings as soon as an ad has been served to your ad space. This means that if you sell 10 days worth of ad inventory at $1 a day, you can start withdrawing your money on the first day.

You can register or find out more on how it works by visiting Aductions.com.

Aductions is launching a “My Experience” competition that offers up to $1000 cash to 7 winners every month.

• Top Prize - $500 - eligible after at least 50 reviews
• 2nd Place - $300 - eligible after at least 30 reviews
• 3rd Place - $100 - eligible after at least 15 reviews
• 4 Runner Ups - $25 each

All you have to do is review or blog about your experience on the Aductions Platform.

Requirements:

1. Write an objective review on your blog or website about the Aductions Advertising Platform.
2. Reviews should be in English, and must contain a minimum of 300 words, and at least one link to the Aductions website.
3. To submit your review in the appropriate discussion in the Competitions category of the Aductions Forum. For example, for the January 2008 competition, post your link in the discussion entitled “January 2008 Review Competition - Submit Links Here“.
4. You should maintain an Aductions ad space on your blog or website throughout the competition.
5. You should have a PayPal account to which your winnings can be sent.

The competition ends on the last day of every month. If the top prize isn’t won, it will increase by 10% in the subsequent month.

In all cases, the winners will be announced on the Aductions Forum within 7 days.

1. There will be a massive consolidation of ad networks.
2. Online video advertising will continue to grow immensely.
3. A major Silicon Valley publicly traded company will go private.
4. I expect to see a slew of solar companies go public.
5. A major blog will be acquired by a publicly traded company.

This past weekend, I spent a few hours surfing through YouTube for user generated video content. Apart from watching funny videos of people doing the Soldier Boy dance, I also use the site to check for technology related videos. Most recently was the video broadcast of Google’s 2007 Analyst Day. The event was attended by many analysts interested in finding out what the company had in store for the future years to come.

I have always admired Google because of the way they revolutionized how we behave on the web. Consumers are constantly jumping for joy when Google rolls out a new product because all they require to use these products is to sit through a few contextual advertisements. Some people think their ultimate goal is to offer every imaginable service in return for showing ads to users who wish to use their suite of products.

My question has always been how they plan on monetizing YouTube? My favorite joy when surfing through Youtube is that I can spend hours on the site without seeing any obtrusive advertisement. I understand Google makes its money from displaying text ads next to relevant content, but I can’t help but wonder how they plan on duplicating the same model when it comes to the number one video sharing site.

I think they can get away with displaying non obtrusive ads on proprietary content of big TV stations, but spreading these ads to user generated content will definitely rub a lot of people the wrong way. My only solution thus far is to start off by capping the number of videos every user can view and advising them that some text or other form of rich media advertisement may be displayed once the cap has been exceeded. This strategy in my opinion will slowly sensitize their users with respect to seeing ads next to video content.