Our look at advertising and opinions therein from the Qumana Survey concludes with a comparison of advertising types. In general, there are two main ways to generate blog advertisements: contextual and keyword-based.
Contextual advertisements are computer-driven. A computer will scan your post and/or your entire blog page to determine what the post is about and which ads would best suit it. In a contextual world, you are completely dependent on how well the computer can determine what you are saying and in providing ads based on that content only.
Keyword-based advertisements are people-driven. Bloggers write their posts then determine which keywords best describe what they have written OR which keywords would be most attractive to their readers. And there you spot the difference: the power of the human brain. Our knowledge and insight are, at least for now, far superior at determining the best ads to place. We can choose to insert ads about blogs when we write about blogging - or we could insert ads about podcasting, as something we think our readers would like.
Without this description or influence, we asked our users which way would be easiest to manage ads. 44% wanted to be a part of a program to insert contextual ads on the blog, and 8% wanted the same for the RSS feed. If we jump from contextual ads to keyword-based ads, 33% showed interest in the ability to manually insert ads of their choice.
According to our survey, 70% of our users (n=71) believe that contextual advertisements are more effective. The vast majority of advertising programs are based on contextual algorithms, but people are not as satisfied as they would like to be. In fact, we know that more than half of you are really not satisfied with current ad programs. So, maybe contextual advertising programs are not as effective as we believe them to be, and don't fit all blogs or all use cases.
n=66
If we look at the patterns of this entire survey, we know that people don't make much money from their blogs... but want to. Some don't use blog advertisements programs... but want to. People find advertising programs complicated, and need help. And bloggers have yet to see the return from RSS advertisements.
Here's what I think. Contextual ads are just not cutting it. If you write a niche topic, you have a better chance of getting some good ads on your blog. Even with that, you're not likely to see great ads in your feed. RSS advertising is stagnant - there is not enough content per post to determine the best ads, and they are too obtrusive and restrictive to earn any return from them.
The best of both worlds would be to use both keyword and contextual ad programs. While 39% of our users would like contextual ads only, a clear 47% would like both contextual and keyword-based ads. Right now, that's possible with some ad programs. It depends on how restrictive the terms of service are - which means more work for bloggers to figure this out.
n=74
Bloggers are cut in by many restrictions with advertising programs. They need to know where their blog templates are, and how to modify them. They need to know HTML. They have to spend hours, if not days, going back to modify the ad blocks. They need to be approved for RSS ads. And they cannot control which ads get displayed from major contextual ad programs.
The ads from major blog advertising programs are either connected with every post (or page) or are turned off - there is no happy medium to decide when and where the ads go. The on/off switch is a concept that just doesn't cut it anymore.
Blog advertising needs a change. And that change is coming.
69% of our users would be interested in using Qumana to insert advertisements. That day is coming. And that day is tomorrow...
Related Survey posts:
On Bloggers
The Use of RSS
Use of Advertising by Bloggers
Blog Advertising Earnings
Opinions on Blog Advertising
Technorati Tags: qumana, advertising, blogs, blogging, money, onlineadvertising, adgenta
