In most markets, buyers and sellers cooperate to set prices: supply and demand. Until recently, that was not true of contextual text link advertising.
I posted about it a couple of days ago: Google AdWords/AdSense maintains a lock on pricing for ads showing on your site. Why can’t bloggers have a hand in determining what they’d let ad space on their blogs go for?
Well, I just got an email from Nick Wilson at Performancing … and that time has come. Performancing is opening up their ad network to bloggers. And as you can see here, bloggers will be able to set their own pricing. The announcement is not official yet – that’s forthcoming. But the option is exciting.
Publishers have the opportunity to set their own prices on a per blog basis. It is not however, what we recommend for the vast majority of our partners. auto pricing is a clever little algorithm that examines your blogs projected impression and click stats, factors in other data gained from similar blogs and aggregated data from your category and determines a fair price for a 30 day spot on your blog.
- The goal of auto pricing is to set the optimal value for an ad on your blog.
- The cost of an ad on your blog will change as the market for that spot changes. Changes to your own statisitcs as well as similar blogs also influence the price.
- You can opt-out of auto pricing at any time by hitting link by your blogs price under the “my blogs” tab.
Of course, Performancing does not recommend it … and I’m sure that for most bloggers, it isn’t a good idea. But for a strictly niched and popular blog, this could double or triple revenue.
Note that Performancing also gives bloggers 70-75% of the ad sale price … whereas we don’t really know what Google is selling ads for or how much margin they’re making. This again can only help bloggers make more money.
Which is not a bad thing!
[tags] ads, performancing, contextual, bloggers, problogger, adsense, adwords [/tags]