I’m here representing Right Media at the Blog Business Summit in gray and cloudy Seattle, WA. The topic of one of the afternoon sessions was “Entrepreneurial Blogging: Maximizing Ad Revenues” with session speakers Chris Pirillo of Lockergnome fame and Andru Evans of GearLive.

Obviously advertising is near and dear to our hearts here at Right Media, so I thought I’d attend this session and give my thoughts on what’s discussed. The session plan was a very open format where the audience could ask questions.

Pirillo led off giving some background on himself as a publisher who’s been monetizing his content since 1996, and been doing it in varying ways from publishing a book, providing sponsorships, selling direct advertising campaigns, running a conference, and using Google Adsense.

The questions coming from the audience started coming out and the discussion quickly turned to if bloggers are really making money from Adsense. There were some positive and negative responses from various bloggers in the audience. On the negative side there were bloggers who said they had decent traffic amounts and were making just cents a day. On the positive side there was Dave Taylor of AskDaveTaylor.com who claimed he’s making $360 a day on average for his site which gets about a million page views a month. This was just further proof that the value of sites widely differs to advertisers. Publishers tend to often group ad networks and the rates they pay into one summary for the network, while in reality results really vary per publisher because it depends on what types of campaigns and advertisers that ad network may currently have that fits the publisher well.

Jason Calacanis was in the audience and provided some insight into how they chose blogs to start specifically at WeblogsInc that they knew get paid good rates from advertisers. He then proceed to say that being early into a topic is really the key. It would take a ton of effort and money in order to compete with gadget blogs like Engadget or Gizmodo. The strategy now according to Calacanis for most bloggers should be to start sites in new areas, or to get hyperniche and create something like a Microsoft Zune blog instead of starting a mass gadget blog. He also sees videoblogging and podcasting as examples of areas where some topics aren’t already claimed with good sites.

Calacanis then talked about how one of the keys to generating ad revenue is to simply outhustle everyone else. He said their two man team at Engadget just outhustled cNET in the gadget space and started winning users and then subsequently ad dollars away from cNET. He pointed to Mike Arrington and Techcrunch as another example where Arrington just outhustles all the newspapers and other journalists covering the startup and web company space.

The discussion turned to ad placement and how it helps or hurts results. The suggestions were pretty simple such as putting ads in obvious places where users can see them, and also doing whatever you can to make the ads look like real content. While this is somewhat deceptive to users, it does often generate good ad results.

It looped back around to Calacanis again who started to give advice on the progress a publisher should go through to grow their advertising. He recommended starting with Google Adsense as the lowest common denominator, then move up to ad networks, then possibly start working with a rep firm if you grow to a large enough size for them to be working with you, then move on to hiring your own salespeople after you can afford your own because rep firms usually take a significant chunk of revenue.

RSS advertising was the next topic, and Pirillo has been selling his own RSS advertising from day one. RSS advertising has seemed to have mixed to bad results for most publishers in the room and most reviews I’ve read on the web as well, but Pirillo was adamant about his success with putting ads into his feed as far back as 2002. He said that the way Google, Yahoo, and others are doing the advertising as ads interspersed between feeds isn’t the answer. What he’s done well with is to just make one of his content feed items a custom ad from an advertiser, and the response has been great.

It was an interesting discussion overall although pretty basic on many levels, but the insights from Calacanis and Pirillo on what has worked for their publishing businesses was valuable to many in the room.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 26th, 2006 at 7:20 pm and is filed under Publishers, Direct Media Exchange. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.