Crenk

Technorati, one of the worlds largest blog search engines has spent a long time trying to find a new model for their company and today I think they have launched a great offering. Introducing Technorati Media. Technorati Media is the new blog advertising network for anyone and everyone. The advertising network will not open fully for another couple months, but you can apply now and hopefully get in early.

Technorati has been testing their ad network for a while already and seem to have found some good results. The ads will be sold by CPM method, in which allow a little more security for publishers within the network. Im always interested when new blog networks enter the market and I cant wait to see what results come from this new network. Here at Crenk we have already signed up to this service, so cant wait to report to everyone our findings.

In the last few weeks a new advertising service has been slowly emerging and has signed some of the power blogs around the blogosphere already, that service is BuySellAds. I came across their service a couple days ago via BloggingTips, and thought I would let all our readers know about their service.

Buysellads are basically an advertising marketplace or a serlf-service platform which allows publishers and advertisers to meet in one single location and automate all of their advertising needs. The platform itself is not overly new, because it has been done in a similar way by Adbrite for many years now. However, that being said Buysellads is blog specific at present and has a more professional and better layout style than Adbrite.

Currently Buysellads take a 25% cut from all advertising purchased across their platform, which isnt niether high or low, because more of their competitors charge in the region of 20-30% as their standard fees, eg Blogads.

Buysellads does I think have a better understand of what is required when it comes to blog advertising. On the publishers individual pages they have details stats like alexa ranking, compete ranking, delicious, technorati and inbound links. This allows the advertisers to gain more of a feel about the popularity of a site.

Publishers can set the number of ads which will be displayed in an ad zone and you can also sell more ads than are being displayed and simply put the ads in rotation. All ads are sold on a monthly basis and you can decide yourself whether banner ads use the nofollow tag.

The entire system is automated, thus allowing advertising to interact where appropriate, and allowing publishers not to have to worry about controlling advertisers schedules, invoicing, credit control, etc etc.

BuySellAds is still in a beta stage at the moment however the standard of websites seems to be very high so don’t be alarmed if your blog isn’t accepted (sites are reviewed individually). Current sites already using the service, bloggingtips, freelance switch, psdtuts, logopond and cssmania.

Im thinking about trying our Buysellads for myself so I can let everyone know if they perform or not. Should I try to get into their beta?

For a long time now there has been a search engine that has been totally forgotten about, that search engine is Dogpile. Dogpile is a meta-search engine that is currently owned by Infospace. I was browsing the site this afternoon and suddenly noticed that there werent any search ads in the results. Im so used to seeing search ads on Yahoo, Google, etc, but nothing on Dogpile. Why is this? Why would they have a search engine that is obviously not getting huge amounts of traffic, but is still getting something, so why not at the very least create a partnership with Google and get some money for those search ads?

This is probably not a good example, but im really sick of seeing Silicon Valley companies who get funding or whatever, but havent actually developed a real business model. Prime example lately was Sonific. Sonific was a great idea, but they never really had an affective business model that could go with their high class product. That is the main reason why I like seeing startups like Techmeme do so well, because they are bootstrapped with no money at all, but they have a real aim and a business model that can pull it all together.

Update: There was a misprint which stated that Dogpile was owned by IAC, which its not. Dogpile is owned by Infospace.

In the last three months we have had a lot of changes here at Crenk. Our previous theme was personalised and since we now have Ade on the team it was a good time to move from a personal weblog style to a more commercial theme.

I have never thought about Crenk being a pure commercial entity. It has long been my personal weblog and I would never want it to be seen as just a stupid money making blog that is trying to earning as much in revenue as it can per month. Since on the new theme I have placed Adsense, this will not be a permanent fixture, just a stop gap until I can arrange some nice in-house placements.

The colour scheme on Crenk has changed and some bought some much needed branding to the site.

Please bear with us as we make a few changes over the coming days. If you have any suggestions or comments about the new theme, please let us know.

Thanks and hope you like the new theme.

Crenk Team

I have made the decision to start a new promotion tool here on Crenk! Instead of selling advertising in 125 x 125 banner slots I have decided to give the banner slots away to Web 2.0 companies.

Every month I will be offering 5 (125 x 125 banners) slots to web 2.0 companies either startups or established companies looking to gain more exposure. At the end of each month I will be selecting from random the 5 slots for the next month. There is really no guidelines at present, you just need to email me: info (at) crenk.com , with your banner ad and a little more information about your company. If you are selected you will not only get your ad on the site for the month but you will also get a writeup about your company and what you do.

So make sure you email all the info to: info (at) crenk.com, or head over to our contact page and ask for some more information.

There are so many startup and web 2.0 companies out there and I know how hard it can be sometimes to stand out from the crowd, so i hope this helps!

I have been reading around the blogosphere today and there seems to be a buzz around Google and if they are dropping PageRankings due to sites selling Text Link Ads. Google has admited to SearchEngineLand that if sites sell text links then their page rankings might drop. I have noticed that a few month ago Crenk was a PR4 and now since i have added Text Link Ads it has dropped to a PR1, for no real reason. Who else has been seeing a drop in traffic and or page rank?

I have long been playing around with the idea of monetizing Crenk but for all the trouble it just doesnt seem worth it at the moment. Ad networks tend to take the majority of the money and dont really give too much back in return. Hence, i thought i would try an experiment, and go Advertising Network Free!

The aim is to provide Advertising on Crenk from an in-house solution and do it cheap. This way i hope that i can provide real value for money and not just give it all to the middleman (ad network). Hence from now until the end of the year the following prices will stand, no matter what my traffic ranking is (and hopefully that should really increase).

• 125 x 125 Banner Site Wide = $20 per month
• Text Ad Link Site Wide = $10 per month

I really want to try to show people that they dont have to use Ad Networks to make a decent amount of money, but we will just have to wait and see if this is viable!