Blog-focused advertising networks are all the rage right now, with both Federated Media and Glam pulling down big valuation financing rounds in the last few months based on very early growth metrics. Other startups, like Six Apart, have launched their own blog advertising networks as well.
As we predicted, Technorati now joins them with the launch of Technorati Media later this morning (the site will be password protected until 9 am PST today), their own blog advertising network. This comes just a couple of days after news leaked of their new round of financing.
The company has been testing the new sales product with a number of partners, including BlogTalkRadio, BlogCritics, BlogCatalog, BlogTV, Technabob, GPSMagazine, GeekAlerts and NerdApproved. CEO Richard Jalichandra says these blogs reach a combined audience of approximately 17 million unique monthly visitors.
Early advertisers on the network include Honda, Acura, Toyota, t-mobile, Adobe, HP, Sandisk, MSFT, Verizon, Sun, Sony, Visa, Nike, Scion, Chevrolet, Paramount, Universal Pictures, 20th Century Fox and Best Buy.
Technorati has explored selling ads for third party sites for some time, but this is the first time they’ve opened the service up to anyone. Unlike Glam and Federated Media, they will take all comers, and say they expect blogs, from the large players on down through the long tail, will find they do a better job monetizing sites than the current options.
Ads are sold on a CPM basis. They will not make revenue guarantees, says Jalichandra, but the split between parties is negotiable. He declined to state what rates have been negotiated with beta partners. This is similar to what Six Apart promises, which is also targeting the long tail of blogs.
Jalichandra also says Technorati is uniquely positioned to sell ads at premium rates, even through small blogs, because they will be able to use descriptive tags/keywords, along with their existing blog indexing technology, to better match ads with content.
Technorati’s has seven sales professionals, led by VP Sales Tony Pribyl, a new hire. They also hired a new marketing lead, Jennifer McLean, away from Glam recently.
For now Technorati is only working with larger blogs, although it will be open to all comers in 2-3 months.
Comments
A little late to the party, but it was inevitable. Selling ads on a CPM basis to even the long tail of blogs? I’m perplexed - didnt realize there was a future for impression based ads, especially for small publishers. Surely they must eventually have to move to CPC or CPA. I’m no expert in this space, so please correct me if I’m missing something!
Curious to know about Technorati’s share in the ad revenue ?
Sales people can work magic!
I commented this on the last Technorati post, but since there was no response:
Dear Richard Jalichandra,
In case you’re reading this comment stream, please fix RSS feeds on search queries first before you do anything else. They stopped working weeks ago.
Example: http://feeds.technorati.com/se…..language=n
Kind regards
At least this may offer many of the smaller blogs a better return then they presently receive from adsense. Hopefully it will be more transparent as well.
Robin - you will not receive a response. Super nice fluff piece right here.
how will advertiser select a network to advertise on if there are some many of them?
good to see something worthwhile happening at technorati finally
rk
http://www.FreXper.com - Free Dating Network
A co-worker of mine got recruited by a Swedish “social media ad network” company called Tailsweep (http://www.tailsweep.com). They seem to have a solid system and a good grip of blog advertising in Sweden, expect them to take on other regions too. If you’re looking into this field, I think you should check them out.
Congrats to the crew at Technorati, I think they are going to do great thinks in bringing high quality advertising to the tail.
It will be interesting to see how this ad network from Technorati performs
This seems very interesting. I always loved CPM coming from a tv background. Even for small publishers this is great. Content is content! some of the best content out their comes from some small blogs of under 100 readers.
“For now Technorati is only working with larger blogs…”
should be:
“For now Technorati is working only with larger blogs…”
While the former implies that the only thing Technorati is doing with their time is “working with larger blogs”, the latter implies that the only blogs that Technorati is working with are the larger ones.
What does TR get out of it? I hope this becomes a viable option to the arrogant Adsense. Today we have no competition in YSM or Adcenter. Leave alone the smaller player.
-DH
http://techwatch.reviewk.com/
Given Technorati’s track record of “always broken” I doubt the average blogger will make any money at this. If they’ve been unable to keep the system functioning and can’t track my posts, what makes you think they’ll be able to track and payout ad revenue? I’ll stick with adsense: I get a nice check every month!
Hello? BlogAds.com?
Today seems to be a milestone day for everyone.
Firefox wanting a world record
http://vishtecho.blogspot.com
It is not pretty fair for todays blogosphere. What I really want from Technorati is that they force themself to become “Google AdSense” of blog. Instead being something like FM or alike.
Anyway, keep fighting for Jalichandra and all TR dude! Wish the best for you guys.
@grammar police
I suggest you to create your own web app for this useful service (fixing grammar). I guess, there are so many people that will be interested on this one. Especially for people that found English as their second language. Yeah, me too …
http://blogleagues.com
Is Technorati Ad Network for US only ? Or will it be available to bloggers all around the world ?
I think Federated Media only works in US, so if Technorati supports blogs outside US, then it is a real steal and I give two thumbs up for that !!!
It is not pretty fair for todays blogosphere. What I really want from Technorati is that they force themself to become “Google AdSense” of blog. Instead being something like FM or alike.
http://www.sitespaces.net/tc/S.....reator.txt
You may have missed this Mike. There were problems with the acquisition of PHP Nuke.
great, so now all the smaller blogs can have crappy CPM ads on their site(s) too… sell direct, or sell your ads to targeted advertisers for your niche in a smaller ad network. The last thing I want to see on blogs I value the content on is ads for comcast or verizon…
It’s exciting to see Technorati step into this space and bring smaller bloggers a way to bump their monthly revenue - even if it’s not huge.
I just hope they DON’T try to become AdSense and instead bring bloggers incremental growth ON TOP of AdSense.
Does this mean that they will focus upon an SEM campaign towards all bloggers? And if so what are the prices for minorites bloggers to access this? Its a great idea, I wish them all the luck on this one.
This is very interesting news. This will save the company, but it depends how good the sales staff are in the long run. I think it is an interesting strategy and look forward to seeing and testing the system.
I will also be writing a little post about this news very soon on http://crenk.com
Its live now. The form is simple. Most high CPM ads have limited daily budgets and poor ad fill rates, lets see how they fare.
They should open up the ad network for everyone Not just the big guys.
That is when they will start seeing the revenue to grow!
Cheers, Nag
But as more blogs or social networks start to use advertisements on their websites, the more common ad-blockers will become. Who can win the battle?
As long as they keep providing irrelevant ads, people will keep blocking them. Only when a true-targeted advertisement technology comes, the benefits will be mutual.
Thank you for the coverage and the support. With regard to comments on search: Richard Jalichandra has posted to the Technorati blog, covering the network announcement — but also addressing what we’re doing with our search infrastructure:
http://technorati.com/weblog/2008/06/438.html
Robin: the feeds have been fixed – there’s more on the problem and the fixes here:
http://technorati.com/weblog/2008/06/437.html
This is great way to show how good are they.
My contribution to this post…
http://www.jogtheweb.com/reade.....rackId=111
Wow… Technorati getting in the ad game…. such a competitive space… what will differentiate them? http://www.readtheanswer.com/index.php?rta=blog
Display ads are so 2002. People are immune to banner ads… i doubt being posted on blogs is going to increase ROI.
I would like to reply to Robin,
I am the operations manager at Technorati and we have both feeds and api turned back on. I hope we have not cause too much trouble in having these services off while fixing other problems, we strive to have all services up all the time and do the best we can with a small staff.
Technorati looks like Digg now, only more cluttered.
Great news indeed. I was a bit pissed off with Google’s get-banned-anytime attitude and poor customer support. Yahoo Publisher Network on the other hand never cared to support non-US publishers and was never blogger-friendly.
Hope another Tier I ad network is in the making! Anyway, they have in and out statistics about all good blogs on this planet already!
Cheers,
Ajith
it looks like everybody want to join advertising bandwagon.
Anyway this will be a god news for us blogger. More option to make money online.
thank you technorati
lankapo.com
malaysia
What Technorati is doing is not exactly “ground-breaking” because there are so many blog ad networks out there. However, I do feel that Technorati should be focusing on fixing the problems that they have going on right now before starting up something this bug right now. For example, a previously blogger commenting on fixing the RSS feeds before Technorati does anything else.
I am curious to see if starting this blog ad network can save this site, and hopefully fix their problems as well, and quickly.
I have two blogs listed there that won’t ping still after a year. I still need them fixed.
um.
SHIT.
DAMM techonorati!
I hate technorati.com.
get away technorati.com
Go to the hell technorati
adsense rules the web ads, hope technorati wold work in consonance with it : )
welcome move by technorati team
Would technorati Ads could be used by small Bloggers too like Adsense?
Technorati all the way, to hell with Adsense, they pay you with peanuts.
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