Last week on May
28th, blogger advertisement service Skyscraper went from a closed
beta to open to the public. Skyscraper,
a company that help blogs generate revenue through direct ad sales, over 1.5
million ads to be exact, is starting to shift to a service that covers all blog
monetizing advertisements. Skyscraper allows bloggers to place ads where they want them, view which
ads are running, and how much cash they are making all on one dashboard. Bloggers also have the option to receive notifications through e-mail, text, or twitter if they sold an ad or added a new follower. To kick off their expansion, on this same day,
Skyscraper also announced its integration with VigLink, a service that only
requires a few clicks to link into affiliate links and earn extra revenue. Remember those two important words we learned
during our presentation, impressions and clicks? With this partnership bloggers can see how
many impressions they have to sell and how many clicks their ads are getting.
Because Skyscraper is looking into offering a broader variety of advertising
services, they are also looking into adding sponsored posts. This new launch was also a very important day
for Skyscraper because they began offering their WordPress plug-in available for
download which not only makes integration of these new services more efficient,
but also user friendly because it installs the Skyscraper media-kit. Skyscraper raised $500,000 last year and it seems
safe to say that they are strategically growing their services and have the
potential to compete in blog advertising. They have been featured in the popular TechCrunch and VentureBeat. Small businesses should be psyched! What impact do you think blog
advertisements have on the audience? Do you have any examples of blogs you follow that contain ads? Would you be interested in this if you had sponsors?
Lardinois,
F. (2013, May 28). Blog monetization service skyscraper comes out of
closed beta, adds viglink integration & wordpress plugin. TechCrunch,
Retrieved from http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/28/blog-monetization-service-skyscraper-comes-out-of-closed-beta-adds-viglink-integration-wordpress-plugin/
That is really interesting. I think this is a great opportunity for small business owners. I know a lot of stay at home mom bloggers who actually generate their own income from blog advertising services like Skyscraper. I think the dashboard and wordpress integration will generate a lot of buzz for them.
ReplyDeleteThis is a great blog own how businesses use blogs for advertisement. Growing a business with blogs can be extremely useful. Today, more and more consumers are starting to follow blogs. I do not have any examples I can give right now, but I am just beginning to work with blogging. I'm sure I will start to see advertisements through Skyscraper. Sponsors are always a plus when trying to generate new business.
ReplyDeleteJoshua
Not knowing the numbers behind it but I do not believe that you as a small business or individual can generate that much revenue from blogging as for large companies who get the traffic could. They are also the ones who advertise on such services. I see advantages to advertise through this just not for small businesses generating money. My question is how many people on average visit blogs? How much traffic can one blog really get? I personally never go to blogs, but that is just me
ReplyDeleteI had never heard of Skyscraper before, but it sounds really interesting. I like how they allow you to choose which ads you want to show on your page and where you would like them to show up. I use affiliate links a lot because of the rewards they provide, so it's great to see they provide that aspect as well.
ReplyDeleteIt also lets you track the number of clicks? That's awesome! I would use it just to see around how many people might be visiting my page.
As a user, I don't like advertisements, but if it's a way to earn a little extra money as being the blog owner then I wouldn't mind having them.
It's really amazing to me how many impressions a banner ad needs to generate clicks. The conversion rate is extremely low - way less than 1%. When I was in charge of internet advertising at a car dealership, we would pay roughly $4,000 to have our banner ad show 200,000 times (impressions) during a month on a local TV News' website. We would average about 200 clicks monthly from those campaigns, and even though that seems low, we would usually keep them on the hope that just being in front of someone's eyeballs was effective.
ReplyDelete