From a provocative article on paid search by Sandeep Krishnamurthy that landed in my inbox this morning:
How is it that despite extended use of search engines on a daily basis, so few savvy individuals have clicked on an ad? Why is it that everybody is in love with Google’s stock price and yet so few people love the ads that it displays?
Could it be that the ads really don’t work the way they are supposed to? Could it be that we are in the midst of a search advertising bubble driven by overconfidence in the abilities of overrated services and an abundance of small, undiscriminating advertisers eager for any bump in traffic?
There are really two things driving this: a superclicking class that is artificially boosting ad prices, and an overworked and under-appreciated blogging community whose free labor is providing the content where ads might be placed.
If you are an advertiser, you should take this seriously.
As I am both an advertiser (modestly, through Goodle Ad Words, for my freelance commercial writing service) and a content creator in that “under-appreciated blogging community,” I continued reading.
As a blogger, I laughed out loud in rueful agreement at this:
Blogging is one of the big content engines driving the current price of text ads. And yet bloggers are among the most under-appreciated, utterly exploited and overworked content workers who rarely see the fruits of their labor. Bloggers simply have to deal with a lot. They put up with snippy PR folks who constantly see bloggers as illegitimate actors whose voices need to be quashed, and IP lawyers who would be glad to shut them down on the pretense of IP infringement. On top of that, services such as Google’s AdSense do not pay bloggers their ad revenue money until it exceeds $100. Unless you are on the top 100 list of blogs, you are making very little money. The result might very well be that the current blogging movement is simply unsustainable.
That assumes the only reason for blogging is the money earned through ad revenue, and the sole source of income for the writer is from blogging. Poor assumptions by the article writer. Really poor planning by the blogger!
Krishnamurthy adds to the gloom by noting a flattening in user traffic to both search engines and blogs.
That should come as no suprise to anyone familiar with the “attention economy.” Even Chinese cubicle slaves farming gold in World of Warcraft work in shifts.
He notes that the next step — reaching a target audience rather than superclickers with no offline life — is much harder.
With that much, I agree.
Content is king: writers of online content can only become more valuable.
Now if we could only get paid to reflect that!
