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Oct

The new trend among probloggers - Ad Real Estate themes

Hey did you notice it? Seems like everything in the blogosphere is viral? No, I’m not talking about “i-phone reviews” by someone who even haven’t seen one or “I hate Aglocco because you didn’t pay me ” campaigns ….(Yeah! I made that up).

Did you notice the new “Ad - crazy” syndrome happening? yeah, poor souls like you and me are spared, this has only got to do with the “ProBloggers” who have sponsors waiting in Queue for an ad-spot.

I first saw John Chow do it, then came in Darren, then John TP, then DailyBlogtips, then my buddy Kevin Bloggingtips. All of them have gone for a site template redesign and opted for a theme with more importance to ads. Particularly the square button (125 x 125)ones. What’s with this now?

Darren has pulled off AdSense ads completely from his blog. So gone are the days when bloggers picked templates based on how it would accommodate AdSense ads and how the background colours blended with your AdSense ads.

Today we have templates that have 30% of it’s real-estate reserved for sponsored ads. In fact, these ads give them more money than Google Ads. When Google ads give them a dollar or two only when someone is clicking it, these image/banners ads are paid for impressions. And with probloggers enjoying huge traffic, it’s but natural for them to opt for these ads to AdSense.

An issue that’s raised (necessarily or unnecessary you decide) is the effect on user friendliness. It’s a fact that these blogs give more importance to advertising than the content, and this sudden change have even confused some readers. The bloggers argument is that sponsors like to show their ads ‘above the fold’ and hence they had to push the content to the lower half pane. Fair enough! John Chow has gone to extreme that almost all of this above fold region is either ads or promotion.

Another argument from the bloggers is that - regular readers always use a reader to read the posts. So the ads won’t bother them much. While the sponsors are targeting on organic traffic and “stoppers-by” from search engines, this is an excellent strategy where the ads are delivered only to the right kind of audience.

Now, that all probloggers are into “Ad-crazy” syndrome, I don’t think it’s far when we have Problogger and JohnChow look alike free themes on Wordpress.

Are you going for a redesign? Not me (atleast, until I have sponsors queuing up) !

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maneesh

selling banner ads is all i kno.. so yea i changed my theme to suit it.. incidentally this happened around the same time that jonchow changed hsi theme and wihtin a few days darren rowse.. not sayin they copied me.. but then who knows.. hehe…

this will certainly be a trend because of the recent google hunt for text links.. having a banner presents a better way to please advertisers for whom we cannot give page rank juice… also most bloggers once they have regular traffic and heavy pageviews(impressions) in their inventoryit is much better to hav cpm based banners than ppc text links..

Reply
Nirmal

This trend started with John Chow I think and its worked only for top blogs. May be this is the new strategy to make money now that TLA is out of question.

Reply
Gerry

Hi!

I have removed adsense (like Darren) and adopted the new problogger - evil blogger look lol.

See my blog.

Reply
Darren

it’s been going on longer than John, myself or any others in your list. TechCrunch did it a year or so back, as did Copyblogger, ReadWriteWeb etc - not really that new.

It is a change from the made for adsense templates that many of us once had though - but I suspect we’ll see something new again in the next 6 months or so because 125 x 125 ads only seem to work in some niches (particularly techy/web 2.0/blogging related niches).

Selling this sized ad to mainstream advertisers doesn’t work as well - they are still hooked on more traditional sizes.

Reply
A free wordpress theme highlighting ads | DailySEOblog

[...] Filed Under (Wordpress Tips) by Mani Karthik on 09-11-2007 Recently, I had blogged about the recent trend among bloggers going crazy over ad oriented themes. Many of them went for a custom design and incorporated lot of ad spaces in the layout. I think it [...]