Interesting piece on paidcontent.org, covering a talk by Henry Copeland, CEO and founder of BlogAds, a network which serves adverts to participating blogs. Copeland says that only around 100 of the 1500 blogs his company works with are likely to be self-sustaining from advertising — and these are the creme-de-la creme — participation in the BlogAds network is by invitation only. He also recognises that blogs have special problems for advertisers:
The appeal of blogs to marketers is their singular brand identity, making it possible to accurately target their ads. Copeland: “Advertisers say, ‘I know I can trust Blog X, but I also know that Blog X has 100,000 readers — and God knows what those 100,000 readers are going to say.’ It’s not me, it’s the advertisers who are saying this.” And so, BlogAds,which handles advertising for Perez Hilton, Cute Overload and DailyKos, offers to quarantine ads away from the comment pages. “If you look at Perez Hilton, there’s certain kinds of ads that can run on the front page where you can’t see comments. And then on pages where you can see comments, there are other kinds of ads. That is exactly what is occurring.”
Brands are happy to trust bloggers, it seems, but not blog readers. They’re worried that the sort of flame wars that popular blogs tend to attract will somehow create an adverse association for their brand. From this perspective, our nascent UK blog networks should arguably separate adverts from comments, or always moderate comments, if they’re to attract larger advertisers. This is relatively easy to implement: the blogger platform does this out of the box, and other sites could use Haloscan or similar to host comments separately from articles. However, a quick survey this morning would suggest that few UK sites are interested in the separation and pre-moderation of comments of the type that is found on US blog network Gawker’s sites (though I assume they all remove offensive comments, once they are discovered):
Paidcontent: no pre-moderation; ads shown on comment pages.
Blognation: no pre-moderation; ads shown on comment pages.
Techcrunch UK: no pre-moderation; ads shown on comment pages.
Westmonster: register to comment; no pre-moderation; ads shown on comment pages
Shiny Media: no pre-moderation; ads shown on comment pages.
It’s an interesting conundrum. If blog networks start pre-moderating comments, that reduces their ‘bloggishness’. It’s not so much a conversation as a return to ‘Letters to the Editor’. But if that is what it takes to attract more advertising, and thus more investment in the content of these blogs, will readers forgive that? It doesn’t seem to have hurt Gawker — publishers of Gizmodo and Lifehacker, among others — too badly.
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Interesting points, Ian. From our perspective, it’s very much a matter of getting comments going and then deciding when and how to introduce pre-moderation or invites. Trouble is, British users are far, far less enthusiastic about commenting on new titles than American (or even French) users. So we’ve got to get the audience in, get them engaged, get them commenting, and then choose the right moment to start putting in barriers. But if you put the barriers up first, and put them too high, things can get messy (arf) quickly.
Interesting piece Ian and good comment from Lloyd. The only 100% reliable way to route round the problem is to pre-moderate everything, which definitely slows down the interaction.
On the other hand, it protects the blog brand and allows some pre-warning if things are about to get sticky for an advertiser.
Chinwag’s used this method for over 10 years now and I still think it’s the best route, although it’s regularly discussed both internally and externally. It can be hard to justify the resource required to properly manage pre-moderation.
The majority of advertisers are still thinking like worried medieval fools hiding behind the fortress walls. ‘We don’t want no risk, ooo noo — I’m only going outside if them nasties in the woods promise not to come get me’…
What a load of self-denial / ignorant bollocks.
It’s a big scary world out there, but grow up, accept risk, and get out and about in it.
What does it matter what the readers or commenters say?
They can and will and DO say whatever they want:
1) in the REAL WORLD
2) on their own online properties
Control doesn’t exist like it used to, remember?
Big brands can’t hide from negativity.
Remember Dell, Landrover, HSBC, and every other notable case study of the last 24 months.
The quicker they (or we, as a community of business people) learn to listen, and then act on what they hear and feed it into product and service development, the quicker they’ll generate more and more positive feedback.
This is more old skool fear logic applied to a world where the fundamentals are — ahem — fundamentally different.
The best thing we can all do to help this is not separate comments from content or whatever other paper-thin protectionist technique, but instead help educate, coax and tease those same advertisers to understand the new world that they operate in.
Excellent responses, chaps, from three very different perspectives. Will, I expect you’re right, but if it was my livelihood, I expect I’d be thinking more along the lines of Sam and Lloyd.
Sam — I missed Chinwag’s lists off my survey (not being a blog) but yes — I can imagine that it’s not the cheapest route, and that people can’t see the value until something goes wrong.
Hang on… it is my day job, in a way!
The thing I’ve never understood about the brands’ attitudes is that they spend all the time manicuring the brand until point of sale, and then spend no time worrying about the impression their customers give. Hackett being the Chav’s brand of choice for e.g, or BMW standing for Brash Mouthy Wanker :)
Anyway, you get the picture…methinks they protest too much. As Will says, the oiks what buy the brands will say and do all sorts of things in the real world, and a blog is really just a manifestation of that in print.
I know someone who works for Hackett and I can assure you that the chav effect is causing them a lot of sleepless nights… But they really don’t know the right way to tackle that??? It’s tricky — their goods are already expensive, sophisticated, etc. But the Great British Public have adopted them — for exactly the same reasons — as a symbol of adherence to “Ingerlund”.
But, yes, aftersales service is a great example of where loads of companies fall to pieces if they *really* care about about their brand. Their failure to understand Word-Of-Mouth as their most important marketing asset or deficit seems bizarre.