I received an interesting comment today regarding one of my rants where I bemoaned the lack of income from adsense amongst other things. The comment has been rattling around in my brain and had me thinking about where the future of the net and blogging will take us.
Part of the comment I received was:
“Sometimes, those people will really like your content, and they might subscribe. That’s what I do, if I see a blog that has a lot of interesting stuff, I subscribe to their feed and visit them via email – or on my home page. Which, of course means that now none of the ads will even be seen by me. ” Shirley
If, as the Web 2.0 planners would have us believe, we all start to go down the RSS and subscribe by email tracks, actually visiting web sites would be greatly reduced. Once you visit a web site, why go back if you can get access to the site via other means. Not having to visit sites frees us up to work on our own site and its content, and surf to find new sites that we haven’t visited before.
If traffic in general falls, then advertisers are not going to want to pay big bucks for campaigns such as adsense. Sure, the search options are always going to be popular, however with more and more people incorporating the search function in their toolbar, who will ever need to use the search function on a web page. This effectively means that as blog writers, incorporating adsense (content or search) or similar pay to click advertisements will really be taking up valuable page space for little if any return.
What I think will be interesting in the future is if Google or any of the other large search/advertise organisations ever decide to take on ‘pay 2 post’ advertising. If any of the current p2p organisations start to make big dollars from p2p then you can guarantee that Google and others will look a lot closer at p2p as means of increasing their revenue. If you think about it, if traffic starts to drop around the net due to subscription services, then the power of onsite advertising will drop. However if people are subscribing to content, then this becomes the perfect means to delivering your advertising content – probably to a wider audience than the current pay-to-click and search advertising.
I know from my perspective, once I get that first $100 (I am almost 1/3 of the way there) from google, I am going to drop all pay-2-click forms of ads on my sites and only look at p2p as an income stream. I will never have the content, quality or traffic to justify any other form of advertising. If my writing and content does get to a standard where I get high traffic, or subscriptions, then I will just ask for higher prices when it comes to p2p.
My crystal ball for the future – pay-2-click advertising will start to drop off and be replaced by pay to post advertising. The large search/advertise organizations will move closer to p2p – naturally changing the format, the price (down – big time) and the content (only positive product orientated). Check back here in five years and tell me I was wrong. If you would like to debate the issue then visit Blogcatalog Discussions here.
Hi all,
Lessca, you make a good point and I believe it’s already being or has been addressed at least for wordpress users. I read somewhere there is a plugin for wordpress that actually allows you to insert ads into the feed.
I have no idea how it’s done but i’m going to search plugin database tomorrow and try and find out more about it.
I have also heard about the pay2post places you mention but they are too strict for me, good idea though.
Tony:)
ya .. agreed … paying blogger to post will be the next generation of income for blogger as the post are more valuable than just waiting for clicks to happen.