Google recently pulled its mandatory ads from Blogger, and the expected next step has arrived. From the announcement:
This may shock you at first so steel yourself for the idea. Ready? We are going to start paying bloggers. Soon you will be blogging for dollars. That’s right people, chocolate is to peanut butter like AdSense is to blogs. Or is it the other way around? Either way, we’ve got something big here folks.
You may have noticed that we recently removed our ads from Blogger powered blogs. We were making money from those ads but you weren’t getting any of it. Now, we’re inviting you to set up your own Bloggerized AdSense account so that you make the money.
I think they are setting themselves up for a fall though, by pointing to Matt Haughey as the exemplar. His PVRblog is great, but it’s in no way a typical blog. Nor is Metafilter for that matter.
In any case, this is clearly Google cleaning up its AdSense inventory. By letting bloggers self select, they are getting rid of the crap….
They were careful to add this after the PVRblog example:
“AdSense for blogs is not a get-rich-quick scheme. “Don’t just slap ads on your blog and expect to get rich the next day. It takes time to build an audience and gain links from people that find your content useful.” Wise words from a long-time blogger. Still, there is money to be made and if you’re interested here’s how to get started.”
You gotta admit, it’s a class act on Google’s part. Bloggers get a piece of the action, and as being profit-sharers, take their blogs more seriously. Quality of content goes up, improving search relevance. Mindshare of AdSense goes up.
Blogger gets more subscribers, better content, more exposure, *and* a percentage of the ad money, just for setting the thing up. It’s win win.
And mysteriously, the organic index rankings of all those blog pages starts to creep up, so Google monetizes organic results too… albeit indirectly… 😉
There’s one correction I think you need to make. It’s not ads from Blogger, but ads from Blogspot. Since I have my own domain and hosting, even though I use Blogger for my blog, I don’t have ads. If I were to be using Blogspot for “free” hosting, then it becomes ad supported.
I’ve seen nothing but ads for Blogspot on Blogspot, so I have to wonder if it’s more that they can sell the AdSense ads better than what was going on with Blogspot ads.
And as far as my own blog goes… 245 unique hits this month. Quite a scorching blog! 😉 I don’t know how many times Bloglines hits it for me. I thought Google was getting a bit out of hand for spidering my site, but now I see that IBM_Planetwide is hitting my site more than Google is. A PageRank of 5 for my little blog. Which I find… amazing, actually.
I’ve chosen to opt out of the AdSense program. At least, for now, we can opt out. Might not be so lucky in the future. (That blogspot ad at the top was annoying – the new navbar is far handier.)I think I’ve had about the same Bryan, around 300 unique visitors … oh they’re running for my blog – yup 😉