Why Ads In Feeds Matter

Advertisers and marketers have found the blog world. I bet that at least $3mm and maybe as much as $5mm in advertising will be spent in the blog world in Q4 and that doesn’t include adsense. With adsense, its obviously much higher.

But the vast majority of that money will go to ads on sites. That makes sense because advertisers are used to buying on sites. They’ve been doing that for years. They may be just getting used to blogs as a viable advertising medium, but they certainly understand what a banner is and how to serve one onto a web page.

But here’s the problem with focusing on the blog page. Less than half of all my impressions last month happened on my site. I delivered about 300,000 ad impressions in September. Over 60% of them were in my feed. That’s right, sixty percent.

And think about who that 60% represents. It’s not the people who are typing Allen Iverson email into Google and visiting my post on Allen Iversion (something that happens a fair amount on my blog since I am the fourth link down on that search term).

It’s the people who read enough blogs everyday that they need a feed reader. It’s the people who like my blog enough to subscribe to it. It’s the people who read it regularly. In short, its my core audience.

If you want to reach them, you have to be in the feed. Ads on sites are nice. But if you want to reach the heart of the blog world, you gotta be in the feed too.