Notes on the pyRads launch:
Now that I've pulled my head out of the sand of that project, I'm going to focus on taking care of business and dig out of my pile of past-due to-dos. And wash my damn dishes. Yikes.
- It's something I've been thinking about for a while, as observant Evhead readers may have noticed. On August 16th, I wrote (regarding an ad-server ASP), "What would make it killer, though, is an interface for self-serve ad buying. Anyone got that?" In September I launched the self-serve advertising on Blog*Spot. Last month, I commented on Slashdot's move to big ads and how micro ads seem like an idea who's time has come.
- Right after that, I linked to and had some interesting emails with Thomas, who had been simultaneously having a lot of the same thoughts and is also working on a solution to this problem. Thanks to him for the term, "micro advertising."
- I noted with interest Pud's HTTPADS a while back, and was kinda holding off to see what he came up with. But since I hadn't heard anything, and he seemed to only be talking about banners (so far), and there were certain things for Blogger advertisers that no one else could do (we're not doing them yet), we decided to build our own. Still interested to see what he launches.
- I thought Matt's implementation of TextAds on MeFi was very well done and made it more obvious exactly how they could work on Blogger.
- Thanks to Jason for help in the design, conceptualization, and management of the project (and the name!).
- Jason is also the one who got me to seriously consider launching a micro advertising service, rather than just offering ads on Blogger. (So if it fails miserably, it's his fault.) After thinking about it, I liked the idea a lot. It felt like it fits well with the Pyra philosophy. It's about enabling the independent web. And it's about advertising that makes sense for the medium, rather than trying to imitate previous mediums (which is similar to my pitch about how blogs are a "native" format for publishing on the web).
- Since Pyra/Blogger is mostly associated with personal sites, I expect to hear complaints that we're trying to get everybody to commecialize their personal sites. This isn't the case. We don't see the publisher clients for pyRads to be the majority of Blogger users. I think some personal sites might be fine for ads. I'd consider it here, if they weren't ugly banners, and I could choose the advertisers (which, of course, it the point of pyRads), but this site has more of a business/tech bent than personal anyway. And it's obviously up to the individual and how they feel about it. The dollars aren't going to add up to much for the vast majority of personal sites, obviously. (We'll probably have a page view minimum in order to make it worthwhile to have a site in the system.) And in general, we're not promoting the idea of selling ads on personal sites, i.e., one-person blogs and journals and such. The type of site we see using pyRads is more the ezine/community/special-interest site. But we'll see what happens.
- I wrote an essay on micro advertising yesterday, which puts together more of my thoughts, but haven't had a chance to edit it yet.
- I'll be putting most of my thoughts along these lines on the pyRads blog. (Where I just put a tip about advertising your blog.) (At least until we have the new version of Blogger, which will let me "cc" the interesting ones here. Drool.)
- Speaking of, my main focus is still Blogger. This is all part of the big picture.
Now that I've pulled my head out of the sand of that project, I'm going to focus on taking care of business and dig out of my pile of past-due to-dos. And wash my damn dishes. Yikes.