Disruptive Conversations

WordPress.com Rolls out WordAds, New Competitor to Google AdSense

Want to make money from your blog hosted on WordPress.com?

In a fascinating move today the folks at Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, rolled out WordAds, directly competing with Google's advertising offerings. As they state:

Over the years one of the most frequent requests on WordPress.com has been to allow bloggers to earn money from their blog through ads. We’ve resisted advertising so far because most of it we had seen wasn’t terribly tasteful, and it seemed like Google’s AdSense was the state-of-the-art, which was sad. You pour a lot of time and effort into your blog and you deserve better than AdSense.

Right now there isn't much information beyond what can be found on the application form:

Only publicly visible blogs with custom domains will be considered for this program. ...

Selection will be based on level of traffic and engagement, type of content, and language used on a blog. Some blogs may not be accepted. Entering the form below does not commit you to the advertising program. It just signals your interest in learning more.

Personally, I don't have any blogs hosted on WordPress.com (outside of some experimental sites), so I won't be applying... and I actually share the feeling that most advertising hasn't seemed to me to be very attractive (which is why I don't run any on my sites).

While this is limited now to blogs on WordPress.com, it will be interesting to see if it expands beyond that if the program is successful. Competition certainly is good and having even more options available for bloggers who want to use advertising is good news for all of us.

If your blog is on WordPress.com, will you apply for this program?

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Times when you DO wonder about Facebook's ad targeting...

If you spend any time on Facebook, odds are you've had more than one occasion where you just had to go "HUH?" at the ads that are shown to you.... a few moments ago I had another one of those moments:

Some how I'm thinking the ad targeting mechanism was a wee bit too aggressive on that one... :-)

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AOL Buys Huffington Post - Mathew Ingram Curates The Zillions of Articles

Unless you have been offline today, you have to know by now that AOL bought Huffington Post for $315 million... there are literally thousands of articles being written (some are linked on Techmeme). Thankfully, Mathew Ingram over at GigaOm curated some of the best into a post describing reactions:

What the Web Is Saying About AOL’s HuffPo Purchase

Thanks, Mathew, because yes, there are simply way too many articles being written on this right now!

For my part, I was skeptical when AOL announced it was changing its course to be a "content company", but this action along with their purchasing of sites like TechCrunch and hiring many reporters certainly shows their determination to be a major player in creating online content. I still am admittedly skeptical, but I do have to give them credit for continuing to assemble a great team.

Meanwhile, if you did somehow miss the news today, do read Mathew's post as he puts the pieces together nicely.

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The Back Story Behind The Darth Vader Boy in the VW SuperBowl Commercial

Unless you were offline the past few days, it's been hard to miss mentions of the (admittedly cute) VW SuperBowl ad that features a young boy playing Darth Vader, complete with the ever-impressive Star Wars soundtrack. Certainly in my circles, it has been tweeted, facebooked, blogged, and shared in pretty much any other way...

It turns out that there is another great part to the story... by way of Luke Armour (on Facebook), I learned that the child actor, Max Page, was a patient at the Los Angeles Children's Hospital where he received a pacemaker at 4 months of age.

It's cool to see this story behind the story... and the L.A. Children's Hospital certainly gets kudos on a several points:

• Just getting this story out there as a blog post for people to find and share;
  
  
• Nicely mixing in pictures and video into their post;
  
  
• Posting the photos up to Flickr as well as the blog post;
  
  
• Imprinting/watermarking the images with their logo for all the people, like me, who will use those images in posts like this one.

Sure, it's a textbook case of riding on a wave of viral publicity to promote your organization (L.A. Children's Hospital) and cause (children who suffer from heart conditions)... but... DUH!... that's what the communications team for an organization should be doing!

Well done, L.A. Children's Hospital! Thanks for giving us a bit more of the story behind the story. (And kudos to Max Page, too, for his well done role in the ad.)

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Apple: Masters of the Tease...

Connect to the iTunes Music Store this morning... and what do I see?

Never shy about pumping up expectations, are they? ;-)

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Will It Blend + Old Spice = Positively Brilliant!

By way of TechCrunch, who had a brilliant headline, "When Memes Collide", I learned of this new video from the good folks at BlendTec... Enjoy!

Brilliant work on BlendTec's part to merge their own viral meme with that of Old Spice! Kudos to them.

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Will Everyone Seeking a Job Now Use Adwords? (re: The Google Experiment)

You have to admit, this was a very clever way to use Google Adwords to rise above any other potential job candidates and get a message across:

Kudos to Alec Brownstein for his creativity. Setting ads on 5 people's names... getting interviews with 4 of them... job offers from 2... and now working for one of them at Young & Rubicam (Y&R) New York. All for $6 in Google AdWords spending.

Will this now create a new boom in Google Adwords spending for job seekers? :-)

Alec Brownstein even created a video about it...

P.S. And with this example, what is next? Marriage proposals via AdWords? (Or has that already been done?)

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Times when you your online ad placement does NOT work for you...

When I heard the news last night of the horrible tragedy of the plane crash in upstate New York, I jumped to CNN's web page to find out the latest news. Somehow I'm thinking this wasn't exactly the kind of ad placement Continental was looking for (not that they had any control of it):

My thoughts are certainly with the families of all those affected by this horrid tragedy. I'm flying home to NH from Orlando tonight and I do have to admit that this event will definitely be in my thoughts.

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Seeing Obama ads in Facebook, with VT primary tomorrow...

Given that the presidential primary here in Vermont is happening tomorrow[1], we've naturally been subjected to a heavy dosage of advertising in all mass media. I was, though, rather amused to see ads for Sen. Barack Obama appearing on my Facebook page when I was visiting the site today (see image to right). I haven't seen any ads for Sen. Hillary Clinton, but perhaps this is because, according to TechPresident.com, the Clinton campaign is apparently NOT running any web advertisements! Seems a bit odd in this day and age, but given the degree of expertise within the Clinton campaign I would have to think they have their reasons for doing this. (I would also note that TechPresident was trying to reach the Clinton campaign but had not done so before running their article.

In any event, I thought it was great to see a presidential campaign using a site like Facebook to send out messages. Because I've provided demographic data in my Facebook account they can obviously run very targeted campaigns (such as "all residents in Vermont").

By the way, if you haven't checked out TechPresident.com, I've found it a very useful site to stay up with what all of the various campaigns are doing with regard to technology, social networks, etc.

[1] Yes, we in VT are one of the two "other" states (the other one being Rhode Island) who are voting tomorrow in addition to Ohio and Texas. However, due to the tiny number of delegates we have we don't get much mention and in fact neither Clinton nor Obama have visited VT.

Eliminating podcast advertisements (and making "Podshow Suck Less") - Christopher Penn provides a script to do so

What does someone do when they can't stand the advertisements at the beginning of some podcasts?  Why, they come up with a script to remove those advertisements, of course!  Given that one of the reasons for podcasting's success, in my opinion, is the large number of people seeking an alternative to the constant bombardment of ads on commercial radio, it is to be expected that some people would seek ways to get rid of the ads that are now appearing in some podcasts.

This does,however, present a bit of a dilemma.  Many in the emerging world of podcasting are seeking ways to make a living though podcasts... to "monetize" their shows (oh, how the linguist in me abhors that word!)... and turning to advertisements is one logical step, assuming the community of listeners will stand for it.  PodShow has been one of the main folks out there experimenting with how to monetize podcasts - and it's been interesting to watch their experiments. But here you have some folks seeking a way to strip out those ads.  What's next?  Do we get a TiVo-like MP3 player that can automatically detect and move past ads in podcasts?

It's a fair warning, though, to people looking at how to market into podcasts that maybe advertisements aren't necessarily the way to go - at least with the population listening to podcasts these days. (That may change, of course, as more people move into listening to podcasts that are drawn to podcasts primarily for content rather than a dissatisfaction with the way things are today on commercial radio.)

P.S. The irony, of course, ist that the specific ad that Christopher Penn and others in NE Podcasting were seeking to remove is a ad for the "Help Podshow Suck Less" campaign that is effectively Podshow's effort to involve people in customer satisfaction surveys, etc. to make the network better.

Technorati tags: podcasting, advertising, christopher penn, podshow