The Qumana Survey delved into the topic of advertising in quite some depth. Given the amount, and depth, of information, we'll likely get about 3 good posts out of it, all with some great insight into people's perspectives on advertising and their participation therein.
This first post will look at the presence and use of advertising by bloggers.
(n=89)
Out of a 89 respondents, only 33 people participate in advertising programs of any sort, and of those, only 7 knowingly insert advertisements into their feeds.
Analyzing the data further, those most likely to be participants in advertising programs were more likely to write on 3 or more blogs and to be more active in the blogosphere for greater than 6 months - this isupports the premise that experienced bloggers are more likely to want to earn revenue, at least in part, for their efforts.
(n=33)
By far, participants indicated use of the AdSense program most often to earn revenue from their blogs. There are a number of bloggers, though, who use multiple programs. There is a small proportion of bloggers using two or more advertising programs to maximize their earning potential.
It is clear that AdSense currently offers the most comprehensive advertising program to bloggers. However, as we see from our follow up question, most bloggers are only taking advantage of blog-centric advertising, those ads that appear on the site only. This does limit some earning potential that could be had from RSS-enabled ads, but it could also spell, for some, frustration with RSS-advertisements: either a dislike for RSS ads in general (which we cover later) or for the performance of said advertisements. For example, I have tried the AdSense for Feeds program with very little success, and therefore disabled it.
Whether these programs are successfully generating revenue for bloggers is not a topic of this post- but rather one to be examined in a later post (since we did ask some questions in this area).
Bloggers not participating in Advertising programs
When you examine the flip side of those who choose not to participate in advertising, you see a drastic reduction in number of blogs supported - the vast majority of those indicating this preference had 1 to 2 blogs, although some have 3 to 5. Where we see the greatest variance is in length of time blogging - here, we see a fairly even distribution of bloggers of all experience levels. This tells me that participating in advertising programs is an informed choice.
(n=50)
There are some bloggers, around 20 in our survey, who choose not to participate in blog advertising due to a dislike of advertising. Others not participating in advertising programs had other reasons, the strongest being the belief that their blogs will not make money. These bloggers have either no faith in the advertising programs, or feel their blogs are too small to make money.
I think it's a combination of the two. For example, one serious barrier to trial is the high payout minimum for programs such as Google AdSense. This large figure, usually over $100, prohibits bloggers from testing the waters, so to speak, because any revenue they do accrue will not be paid to them, and this could frustrate bloggers from spending the time to tweak their ads for greater earnings.
34% of bloggers who don't participate in advertising do intend to sign up for an advertising program of some sort, and a high proportion of those have requested assistance - this strongly affirms that a proportion of bloggers just don't know how to place advertising on their blogs. This relates, in part, to the difficulty in setting up blog-centric advertising programs like AdSense, which require you to know how to edit your template to insert the proper code to generate the ads.
This knowledge of editing templates and such is far beyond that which we will see later from experienced bloggers - in future, experienced bloggers will not necessarily be those geeks who know about blogging, but those people who are good at writing and interacting with people. Web 2.0 is characterized by tools that are intended to make publishing simple - such simplifications will take power away from those geeks who once ruled the Internet domain.
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Our next posts will follow with the earnings rate in blogs and finally with the opinon of advertising in blogs, which can be quite a hot topic.
Related posts:
Blogging Survey - On Bloggers
Blogging Survey - The Use of RSS
Technorati Tags: qumana, blogging, survey, advertising, blogads, adsense, RSS advertising, problogging, blog-centric ads
