AdBrite – Network-Wide?
March 9th, 2006
As many would know, AdBrite is a text ad marketplace, where publishers sell space on their sites (or blogs) to advertisers for a daily, weekly, monthly (or any other time frame, really) period. While CPC and Intermission advertisements are available, this BlogAd-style, time period advertising system is probably the most popular choice among both publishers and advertisers.
Recently, we’ve been thinking of putting up AdBrite on a “network”-wide basis – though is-there isn’t a network per se – which will result in the same AdBrite adverts being shown across all is-there blogs. The benefits of this are obvious: More impressions, clickthroughs and thus, lower ACPCs for advertisers, making each advertising deal more advantageous. More advantageous deals then tend to attract more advertisers.
But the downside is equally clear: Adverts will be contextually irrelevant across many blogs due to the “network”-wide nature of the advertisements. Just look at b5media’s implementation of this to see what I mean. There are advertisements about plastic on entertainment or even blogging blogs like Problogger.
So, it’s clearly going to be pretty hard balancing revenue vs. relevance when such an advertising system does get implemented. However, that is unlikely to stop us from trying it out as “network”-wide Adbrite ads would definitely allow us to access a larger advertiser market.

March 9th, 2006 at 2:04 pm
[...] We’ve been considering adding a dedicated page just to provide some sort of “description listing” of all the is-there blogs. We figure that it would be good for advertisers to get a preliminary view of all the blogs (especially in light of our upcoming “network”-wide AdBrite use) or even for curious visitors that might end up visiting the described blogs. [...]
March 9th, 2006 at 4:02 pm
Yeah, we’ll be moving to a per-channel model sometime in the next few weeks, to produce more relevant ads, but also to increase the inventory and visibility
March 9th, 2006 at 10:30 pm
Ahh, I see. However, is such a model suitable for a network with such a large number of blogs? There are bound to be quite a number of blogs still stuck in relatively early stages.
But given the great things said about how successful b5media’s rev-share model has been so far, I have little doubt the move will be a step in the right direction.