Hit the “Hello Goodbye” button in this widget, and what you’ll hear is (1) This is Jonathan Clay and you’re listening to a brand-new song called ‘Hello, Goodbye.’ Thanks to Levis 501 Jeans for making this a free download
and (2) the song, which makes my skin crawl but what the hell I’m not the target market and that’s probably what it’s supposed to do.
That’s from a company called TrueAnthem (check out their FAQ for a fine intro), which describes itself this way:
an advertising supported, online music promotion and distribution company. We believe that artists should get paid for what they have created; that fans want music for free; and that the best way to reach a targeted audience for an advertiser is through music.
They remind me of blogads in that they’re matching advertisers with independent content producers.
I used blogads way way back when. Another thing TrueAnthem and Blogads have in common is that the HTML they give you to embed doesn’t validate and screws up a web page like this one, so you’ll have to debug it for them. Hint to TA: <BR> has been off the shelf for ten years. Did you mean <br />?
Another thing they have in common with Blogads is that they’re stuck with mid-range to low-range ad inventory. Content producers (bloggers and musicians) that get a really big audience have an incentive and the means to either do their own ad sales or to move to a premium network. In either case they make more money on each incremental bit of traffic once they leave TrueAnthem/Blogads. Or at least that was how the space worked back in the day; it must have changed, though, because I can easily find largish sites that still live on Blogads, like Daily Kos and Perez Hilton. Anybody know why these sites wouldn’t have moved on to a display network like Value Click?
haha – you’re skin crawls and I need a shower after that… maybe the next guy can sell shampoo…
business is heck, man.
I don’t want this album for free. I wonder how much Levi’s paid?
I think sites like Perez Hilton and Daily Kos still use Blog Ads because they still make money. Hilton makes, I think, a fucking fortune, and its a pretty small operation, so why switch? Could also be loyalty. When you have a high traffic site, it doesn’t really matter who you use if the terms are favorable. And maybe those two can get better service/rates from BlogAds than from ValueClick or whoever.
I think these sites (eg Perez Hilton) still rely on resellers like Blog Ads because they need to be aggregated into packages of page views larger than they can generate on their own. EG Perez generates 1MM page views a month and Snickers wants to buy 50MM impressions, so Perez becomes part of a collective that can generate 50MM across all the different blogs.
But then when Perez reaches 50MM himself the rather large part of his markup going to Blogads stops making sense.