Technorati Media has finally launched their Engage (advertising marketplace product) live. Previously this new tool was in Alpha stage and only certain people could use the product. This all happened because Technorati purchased AdEngage.
Since purchasing AdEngage and launching Technorati Media I think Technorati has really lost sight of what their core business model is!
Technorati was a blog search engine that doesnt currently have really market share and presence and their product offering seems to be going down hill by the day. To compensate for this they purchased AdEngage and launched Technorati Media, which is just an ad network.
Looking at the current results from this ad network which has been in operation for several months, seem to be very poor. They are selling advertising for blogs such as The Inquisitr and Profy. The results seem to be as follows, for CPM advertising they are offering a decent CPM rate in between $1.00 – $2.00, but ads are currently only for the USA market and even then their fill rates arent 100%. For all other countries they suggest to use Google Adsense, which is fine, but unless you have a huge amount of USA traffic then this isnt really worth the effort, because what you make on USA revenues you lose on Google revenues elsewhere. In terms of selling sponsorships they also seem to be terrible, with The Inquisitr having 2 125×125 ad slots in the sidebar in which they havent even been able to sell 1 for a few months.
This is all about Technorati realising they dont have a search engine product that is any good, so they are looking for additional revenues streams which will help them eventually sell the company. Is that the way it is or am I wrong?
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?
