September 20, 2005

What's the causal connection between blog traffic and blog advertising?

Gordon Smith observes that all but three of the highest traffic blogs have advertising. What's the causal connection? I doubt that having ads makes you popular, though there is a slight chance seeing ads gives people the feeling the blog is popular/professional and makes them want to keep visiting. It's more likely that having high traffic makes you more likely to accept ads, because you can charge more for them.

And maybe the sort of person who writes a popular blog is also the sort of person who would both want to make money and accept the idea of ads on the blog. That is, the sort of person who would have a thing against ads also tends to be the sort of person who writes in a way that doesn't appeal to the crowd -- but I note that Gordon didn't study how many lower traffic blogs have ads. By the way, Gordon does not have ads.

Note: He's relying on the TTLB traffic ranking, which is limited to Site Metered blogs. He also notes the TTLB problem of blogs that share a Site Meter, making it look as though each blog gets much more traffic that it does. I note that if advertisers then rely on the Site Meter, they are being duped.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Presumably blogs with higher traffic would garner a prettier purse for their ads, no? It may not be worth my time to enable ads for the daily nine-tenths of a penny I'd get from taking Alpo ads on myblogaboutmykitty.com, but some of these blogs get 100,000-ish visitors; I would assume that's real money. Plus it entails higher bandwidth fees, so advertising might be other than truly discretionary.

Charlie Martin said...

Uh, when you have a high-traffic blog, having blog ads pays enough to be worth the trouble?

Ann Althouse said...

What's all this talk about bandwidth costs? At Blogger, we pay nothing.

Also, it is very easy to do a BlogAds ad. You just write the text and upload a graphic. Click on the "buy an ad" link on one of my ads and check it out.

As to having ads because it makes enough money to worth the trouble, that woudn't explain why anyone bothers with Google Ads. They make pathetically little!

Ann Althouse said...

Eddie: Sometimes people donate. It's nice when a reader gives $10, you know. It means something. It's encouraging.

Bruce Hayden said...

I still have a hard time believing that there is no connection between what you make and having the ads. Why would you be any more mercenary than the rest of us? You just have (a lot) more readership.