• by Shankar Gupta , January 6, 2005

Evan Coyne Maloney, who has authored the conservative political blog www.Brain-Terminal.com since 2001, recently decided to sign up with Google's AdSense service. The deal was that Google would send him ads relevant to his posts, and if any readers clicked on the ads, he'd receive a cut of the pay-per-click fee.

As it turned out, publishing ads was more complicated than it first seemed. Maloney pronounced Thursday on his site that Google's contextual ad service, AdSense, was "not ready for primetime." He complained that Google routinely sent ads that weren't meant for his conservative audience. One ad, for instance, asked readers: "How can 59,054,087 people be so dumb?"--referring to the voters who re-elected President George W. Bush in 2004.

"I could live with the occasional mistargeted ad, but it seemed that a vast majority of the ads were inappropriate for large segments of this site's audience," Maloney wrote Thursday on his site. "I could even live with the many ads that highlighted positions different from mine, if some of them weren't so downright insulting." Maloney cited ads that sold T-shirts labeling Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and President Bush "asses of evil," and "Hillary for President" ads. Maloney since withdrew from AdSense.

Google declined to comment on Maloney's specific situation, but the company said that AdSense allows publishers to manage ads placed on blogs. "Computer science plus a bit of human tuning creates the best results," said AdSense Product Manager Brian Axe. "If [the publishers] find an ad that they don't like on their site, they can enter in the URL for that site, and then that ad will not show up." But, said Axe, publishers can't exclude more than 200 ads from their sites.

Maloney's experience is only one example of a larger problem stemming from the highly specific nature of blogs, say some industry experts. Nate Elliott, a JupiterResearch analyst, said that advertising on blogs is challenging because most blogs have small, very specific readerships. To get the big audiences that marketers are looking for, advertisers can aggregate onto a group of blogs, but that could lead their very different audiences to clash.

"Once you start aggregating them, you take away the specific nature of the blog. You've got Gizmodo mixed with Wonkette, and those are very different audiences who appeal to very different advertisers," Elliott said. "That's always going to be a catch for blogs or any other small site."

But such challenges haven't deterred some companies from getting into the blog act, for both advertising or for public relations purposes. MWW, an East Rutherford, N.J.-based PR firm, announced on Tuesday the launch of a blog-centered practice, called Blog 360. The service will monitor what consumers are saying about MWW's clients on blogs, as well as creating corporate communications sites or informational blogs on specific products. "As far as the blogging strategies we'll employ for clients, they'll focus on peer-to-peer communication ... not just the corporate communications," MWW Executive Vice President Alissa Blate said.

But, she acknowledged, companies have to be careful when using blogs for public relations. "You really have to understand the nature of blogs, and they really have to be created and monitored very carefully," Blate said. "Blogs cannot be commercial. If a blog is commercial, it detracts from that peer-to-peer communication. It's about creating communities on the Web."

BURST! Media, an online advertising network, also announced Tuesday the launch of blog-specific sections of their businesses to deal with growing interest. BURST! has begun selling ads on more than 20 blogs, including the Gawker Media blog cluster, which includes popular blogs like Gawker, Gizmodo, and Wonkette.

"There has been an expressed interest from advertisers to reach specific chunks of highly engaged audience," BURST! spokesman Biff Burns said. "As an advertising network with the responsibility of selling as much advertising as we can, we saw the opportunity to create a subchannel for blogs." BURST! claims over 9 million monthly page views for its network of blogs--but the smaller sites, even of the popular Gawker group, pull in fewer than 100,000 visitors a month, according to their SiteMeter numbers.

BURST! has signed the Kyocera Wireless campaign as its first customer, which will be running expandable leaderboards, mainly on the Gawker Media blogs. Burns said that BURST! would deal with the possibility of mistargeting ads by dealing closely with advertisers to make sure they reach only the audience they want. "People are coming in with a specific target audience involved. We would work with advertisers and agencies to make sure that there's not that sort of clash," Burns said. "Advertisers have to be keenly aware of what their message is."

To make matters more difficult, however, blogs could also jump ship from advertising aggregates if the sites become too successful. "Networks can help the individual sites grow up into big earners, but when they do, sites will leave," JupiterResearch's Elliott said. "So there's something of a limit to the quality and audience size that a network can deliver."