jeffc

I’ve been sitting here thinking about the state of online advertising right now and I am pretty much confused. Here’s why.

Television commercials have succeeded at advertising because they are broadcasted to a large audience. So large in fact, it doesn’t take that many people to make a purchase for the ad to be considered a success. Because television ads are viewed by such a large audience, the ad doesn’t have to take into account personal information to make the ad more relevant. This is not confusing.

Now, let’s take a look at online advertising which I find to be confusing. I’ve read a number of reports and polls which claim that the average person would be fine with advertising if the advertising were more relevant to their tastes. How does a company display relevant advertising? Here’s how. They start saving data on their customers, keeping track of buying habits, viewing habits, browsing habits ect. However, there has been a major backlash by consumers that this is an invasion of privacy.

So the majority of people seem to be ok with viewing relevant ads but they are not ok with the way the relevant data is accumulated.

I don’t see people lining up to fill out surveys to voluntarily give this personal information to companies for more relevant advertising. In that case, what is one suppose to do to profit from online advertising? How do you make things relevant without breaching the consumer’s privacy. If customers think one way, companies think another, how will online advertising ever become a more established method of making income?

Ever stop and think for a moment on how so many different aspects of life resemble that of a game? Back on October 23rd, 2007, Wired magazine published an article entitled, When Reality Feels Like Playing a Game, A New Era Has Begun. The consensus of the article highlighted the fact that in this new era, we use game models to motivate ourselves, to answer questions, and to find creative solutions. The game in this case though is blogging.

For many, life itself has turned into a game. Our online lives are just twists on the videogame leaderboards, where we jockey to get our blog a higher rank on Technorati and compete to acquire more friend-adds on MySpace than the next guy.

During my one year blogging experiment, my opinion was that services such as Digg, Stumbleupon and Reddit existed on a basis where end users would submit items that were either helpful or mildly interesting, to the point that it was worth sharing. During the experiment, I had published over 600 different posts. Some of them had been submitted to Stumbleupon, Digg and other social services without me ever asking for someone to do so. I thought this was common practice and a means of respecting the way in which these services were supposed to be used.

I have in fact stumbled my own posts, submitted some of my own articles to digg and have submitted the stories to various social media services. None of my submissions produced an abundant amount of traffic. However, when someone other than myself would do the submission for me, I noticed a large increase in traffic. I’ve determined that the most likely reason for this is the fact that I have not built power profiles on the social media websites that my content shows up on. I barely have any friends on Stumbleupon, I barely use Digg, and I just recently signed up to Reddit. This means I am a nobody. Those who have submitted my articles to these services have a good amount of friends as part of their user profile which is why I believe those submissions have been more successful. I also believe it doesn’t help that the submission is labeled as being submitted by me and if you were to do a little research, you could easily determine that I was in the mood for a little self-promotion.

However, I have noticed that outside of personal blogging, those who blog for revenue or are trying to get their blog/blog network to the top has to in my opinion break the rules of the game. I’ve seen people begging for Diggs, asking people to submit articles they have written to StumbleUpon, getting hundreds of their friends to Digg an article or get it to the top of Reddit.

My way of thinking about this situation is this. If the content I published was good enough, someone out their would do the work for me in terms of submitting the site to a social service. If the content was not good enough, nothing would happen. Now, I’ve seen the light, where people digging this story because that person digged their own story, with this person submitting a site to StumbleUpon because they had a friend who submitted their own site to StumbleUpon.

What is also interesting to note is the business of social media promotion which has sprung up around the blogosphere. There are services that exist on the web in which you can hire to handle social media campaigns. This area of promotion is called SMM or Social Media Marketing. I don’t want to publish the name of the company, but here is an example of what a SMM campaign is like.

In recent years social news sites such as stumbleupon.com, reddit.com and digg.com have become widely popular – displaying billions of daily page views. We will make sure your news item is available on all major social news sites. This is something that we do manually and with great care as these sites do not allow any automated systems. Once your news item is posted there it becomes searchable and available for audiences to interact with and contribute to.

So if you can’t seem to get people to submit your articles, and you are not having any luck submitting the articles yourself, companies exist in which they will make it their mission to spread your content across the web through social media. Performancing.com being one such company ( Performancing Social Media Marketing )

This brings me to my next set of questions. Is there a difference between content submitted to these sites by end users versus companies which have been hired to do so? Does it matter to you as a user of these services that the content may not have been submitted by a user but instead, is part of a large advertising campaign?

I’ve talked to a number of people about this situation and this is what I’ve been told. This is the name of the game. In order to get to the top, above the noise, you have to bend and at times break the rules. But is it considered breaking the rules when this has become a standard practice? Apparently, probloggers all the way down to the personal blogger are using various methods to get their content on these major traffic producing services. I’ve been told that there is nothing wrong with asking people to digg/stumble/reddit content. I can sort of agree with that. But I see a number of people acting in a scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours type of fashion, regardless of the content. I’ve also been told that the algorithms for these types of sites are built to detect the worthless crap that has been added to the site, allowing for only the valuable stuff to be seen.

So what are the rules of the game? When is it considered breaking the rules? When you play the game of blogging, how do you know if you have advanced to the next level?

WhyNotAd.com is an online advertising service which allows user’s to register with the site and place their own ads for free. You can upload practically anything you want such as ads, advertising, classifieds, news, brands, sell stuff, buy stuff, personals, press releases, events, functions, and photos. According to the developers of WhyNotAd, they have created the site in such a way that ads placed on the site are programmed to be direct hits with major search engines.

After registering an account with the site, you’ll be presented with the option to invite friends. This seems to be the typical sign up form for most websites these days. If you don’t have any friends or do not wish to invite them during the registration process, WhyNotAd does provides a method of skipping that action. Once you’ve made your way through the sign up form, you’ll be greeted with a different form in which you will need to fill out to add your advertisement to the site.

Here is what the basic outline of the form looks like.

• Classification: You can choose either Business, Personal or Both.
• Ad Title – no website names or symbols allowed
• Business Category
• Personal Category
• Business And Personal
• Upload an image – You can upload only .jpg, .jpeg, .png or .gif files.
• Add an image via a URL
• Body Description – This is where you would place the text related you the add. You would also place contact information within this spot as well.

After you have configured your ad, click on the Add Advert button. This will create and then add your advertisement to the website. If you would like to see the example I created for this post, you can check out my Jeffro2pt0 Ad. This will give you a sense in how your ad will look within the site. User’s of WhyNotAd can then rank your ad on a scale of 1-10, they can share the ad with friends, bookmark the ad or flag it as inappropriate.

Unfortunately, I did not find a way to go back and edit your ad if you end up discovering a mistake. In fact, after you publish your ad, there is not much else you can do with it. It would of been nice if WhyNotAd gave you the ability to edit ads after the fact or at least provided a certain amount of time for editing to take place. I would of also like to have seen an option to delete the ad.

All in all, I’m not sure how well this will work for you in terms of receiving search engine traffic or organic traffic, but it does provide another easy way to advertise your site and since you have full control over the ad, you can add your link or links to the post which is one more unique link back to your blog.

Convertico is a brand new online tool that enables you to convert ICO files to PNG files and vice versa. You can either link to the file in question and the online tool will convert the file in the background or you can choose to upload an image from your hard drive.

For this review, I submitted the link to my blogs header image which was a .png file. The converter took my large header image which was in png format and converted it to a tiny ICO file which I could then use as a favicon if I wanted to.

So if you’re in the need of an ICO image, this site is a quick and simple way of obtaining an ICO file from a PNG file.