I was hoping that this turns out to be something really classy like Deck ads[1].
Turns out the underlying technology is provided by the Federated Media[2], the same company that provides ads for AppleInsider[3] and Boing Boing[4].
There's still a chance they'll do something different, but I'm guessing that most innovation is going to be on the pricing and revenue splitting side, not the eyeballs-viewing-ads side.
That is valuable, and having more competition for Google is a good thing. But oh well. Looks like we'll still be seeing the same ads.
The Deck is awesome, The Deck is classy. I've always loved their ads and the look of it. But as a publisher, it doesn't add up. I've run the numbers a few times here on HN but I'll give it another crack.
They seem to have about 30 advertisers at any one time and rate card is $8300 per month. Let's sum it up to $250,000 per month in total. They served 110m impressions in October. So that's 110,000 "M". Or $2.27 CPM.
Unless you're in some high traffic, low quality niche, $2.27 CPM is not great (even The Deck's homepage says it's "well below industry norms"), especially as it's a single unit per pageview. As a publisher, the only reason I'd run The Deck would be for the kudos and ability to work with some great people and advertisers.. but definitely not for the money!
I've spoken with folks who've used The Deck and from what I can make out, it's a great deal for advertisers. But for publishers? I'm not so sure. And I'd go as far to guess that competing networks aren't paying significantly higher rates.
I believe the invitation system is precisely why the Deck ads are of the quality they are. Removing that puts you back in the realm of DoubleClick and AdWords.
I think there's a much better case – practical and even legal – for 'WordAds'.
'Django' caused a pure collision with another community project: rude, confusing, time-wasting for keyword searchers.
'WordAds' fits naturally with 'WordPress', is non-identical, and far less likely to generate confusion or search collisions. And, Google's money gusher can defend itself if it there is a legitimate trademark complaint; similar for-profit competitors should push every possible avenue for attention. (It's not nice to step on the toes of a free community project, but it's often heroic to step on the toes of a near-monopoly.)
This is actually pretty interesting. Federated Media recently bought Lijit[1] which has a pretty solid ad exchange. Federated also has an exclusive deal to rep WordPress sites[2]. Combining these two things will allow buyers to access a huge swath of long and mid tail inventory programmatically through the Lijit exchange.
Its nice to see small publishers getting more options in how to monetize their sites. A healthy ad ecosystem is required ensure we all continue to get access to quality, free content.
"for bloggers who would like to earn money from their blogs by showing high quality ads from brand advertisers"
Does this mean less targeted ads from more well known companies?
"Creative minds aren’t satisfied being digital sharecroppers on someone else’s domain, and you want to carve out your own piece of the internet and have a space that you’re proud of because it’s so… you.
If you’re going to have advertising on your site, it darn well better be good, and beginning with our partnership with Federated Media we’re ready to start rolling out WordAds here on WordPress.com"
They'll need to make this available to people who use self-hosted WordPress before these two paragraphs are compatible.
That doesn't change anything. You can't host on wordpress.com—whether it's a subdomain or your own—if you need to do any kind of customization beyond CSS tweaks, and you can't use affiliate links.
I asked the question on the linked blog [1]
The official reply was
"
For now, we are starting with WordPress.com users but look forward to working with folks like yourself who are self-hosted.
"
This boggles me as well, wordpress has a huge install base and them making a sanctioned plugin for these ads would give a much wider audience to advertisers. The only reason I can possibly see wordpress.com sites as the reason for the rollout is that they are doing a limited release in order to not get overwhelmed.
I have no intention to enable this. My blog exists primarily (I hate this term) to promote my personal brand. It's something to which I can point to demonstrate my knowledge and skills in my professional areas of expertise, plus occasionally a soapbox. I don't want to monetize that directly because that would turn me from "the friendly dude who knows about X" to something more like a streetwalker, and I don't want that.
This is basically for wordpress.com users who purchase something from Automattic (domain) to sell something to the world (Ads). There is no indication on what you, the blogger on wordpress.com, may be earning in return for this transaction, but Automattic certainly knows what they'd be earning. Good luck!
As others have suggested, this will probably be pushed out to the .org community through jetpack with the unstated goal of supplanting AdSense/AdWords for blog installations.
Turns out the underlying technology is provided by the Federated Media[2], the same company that provides ads for AppleInsider[3] and Boing Boing[4].
There's still a chance they'll do something different, but I'm guessing that most innovation is going to be on the pricing and revenue splitting side, not the eyeballs-viewing-ads side.
That is valuable, and having more competition for Google is a good thing. But oh well. Looks like we'll still be seeing the same ads.
[1] http://decknetwork.net [2] http://www.federatedmedia.net [3] http://appleinsider.com [4] http://boingboing.net