Performancing, home of the “jobs for bloggers” board and the much loved Firefox blogging plug-in, has added an ad network to its family of services. Performancing Partners is accepting bloggers and advertisers now. Bloggers drop javascript into their sites, prices are either set by the bloggers themselves or by an algorithm relative to traffic and market sector and then ad buyers purchase 125×125 graphic ads for a 30 day period.
Bloggers receive 70% of the ad revenue and a referral reward of 5% of referred bloggers earnings or advertiser spending lasts for as long as the referred party is participating. Payment occurs via PayPal on the first of every month regardless of the amount due. Traffic stats and thus automatic pricing aren’t worked out flawlessly yet on launch day, but hopefully they will be in time.
Performancing may well prove to be a good marketplace for small to midrange bloggers and advertisers. They already have a large community of bloggers participating in their site. Since it’s set up in a way that advertisers are encouraged to visit individual sites before buying ad space and that space is sold in monthly batches, click fraud should be less of a problem than in other systems. The trade off of course is scale, Performancing is like a boutique service for small and medium size sites. There are more than 200 blogs already participating, many of which presumably get very little traffic. The lowest priced ad spaces are all $1 per month. I’ll be curious to see if anyone buys up large batches of Performancing ad spaces on very low traffic blogs. If I had to make one guess on who will buy up a large number of these low traffic ad spaces – it would be that siren of the lonely blogger, PayPerPost. Not for the blogs’ few readers but to provide the bloggers a daily reminder for a month that they could be getting paid more on a per post basis. Yuck. Perhaps Performancing Partners can be an alternative to that.
Performancing will no doubt appeal to bloggers who want editorial control over individual ads on their sites and who want to try diverse strategies beyond AdWords. The revenue split is generous and the Performancing family of services is solid. If the company can pull of the logistics of providing an ad network service, I expect the effort will be reasonably successful.