Making Money With Blogs In 2008 - Audio Ads?

Posted on January 16, 2008
Filed Under Ad Networks |

What’s the future in making money with blogs? I’ve had a number emails in the past week from people promoting new blog advertising programs. If these emails are to be believed, running audio ads on your blog is the way of the future. But are they going to be a good way to make money from your blog?

Advantages Of Audio Ads.

The main advantage being put forward is that bloggers make money per visitor to their blog. There is no need for a visitor to click on an ad or to sign-up for an affiliate’s product or service before the blogger makes money. It seems that these new audio ad networks pay based on the number of page loads.

The other advantage is that these ads can run alongside other ads on your blog, and shouldn’t interfere with the money you’re making from the existing ads. This is because there is nothing to click for an audio ad, so you’re not losing visitors to these audio ads. Visitors remain on your site and are still able to click on one of your PPC or CPA ads even after you’ve made money by playing them an audio ad.

Disadvantages Of Audio Ads.

The main disadvantage I can see is that you may drive readers away. Audio ads have to potential to be more annoying than tradition on screen ads.

Imagine a scenario where you’re catching up with your favorite blog while at work (heaven forbid). Now imagine your embarrassment as the jingle from an audio ad on you favorite blog rings out from your computer’s speakers, waking everyone in the cubicles around you.

Depending on the type of blog you run this may not be a concern, but if you rely on regular readers you may not want to risk turning them away. However, if you are running a niche blog that relies more on single visits via search engines, this may not be a problem.

One of the concerns I have is that there appear to be fairly generous referral bonuses for those promoting these new networks. However, in searching for information about audio ads, of the blogs I visited which had reviews of the program (and coincidently an affiliate link at the bottom), none of them were playing audio ads. I would be more comfortable taking these reviews at face value if these bloggers were eating their own cooking.

Also, CPM rates of $25 or more were being thrown around. This would make the proposition quite attractive even to smaller bloggers but I wonder whether advertisers would see value at these rates. Because ultimately it’s what advertisers are willing to pay that will drive how much money bloggers can make.

Audio ads aren’t something I plan to run on Monetize Your Blog in the near future, but I may give it a try on one of my niche blogs to see how well it works. I haven’t named any of the audio ad networks in this article, but if you think you could start making money on your blogs with audio ads, just search Google to find some likely prospects.

Technorati Tags: Ad Networks, Make Money Blogging




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Comments

2 Responses to “Making Money With Blogs In 2008 - Audio Ads?”

  1. betshopboy on January 18th, 2008 12:07 am

    I actually signed up with one such audio ad program a while back but didn’t implement it on my blog as I feel it will turn off the readers.

    I know I will be irritated if I visited a blog and were serve ads without the options of switching it off.

  2. Brett on January 25th, 2008 12:32 am

    You never know how web usage will change. People might start to get used to the idea of audio ads and then everyone will be doing it.

    But I think you’re right. At the moment I think most people would find them annoying.

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