Sprouting like flowers on steroids, blog advertising related companies are all the rage now. The latest comes from Roger Simon, Charles Johnson and Marc Danziger who plan to launch a network which would allow placement of ads a large group of blogs rather than the BlogAds service which allows for individual blog selection. While the yet to be named company has not launched nor full details revealed, one wonders why one would take the niche targeting benefits of weblogs, most of which focus on a single topic, and group them all together into yet another massive, nameless, faceless online network. Certainly, there are benefits of scale to advertisers and advantages individual bloggers can realize from this service but the selling point of weblogs in general has been their unique character and voice. Lumping them all into one big ad buy seems counter to what the medium has to offer advertisers. Yet, admittedly, no media buyer wants to mess with thousands of tiny sites when one larger collective will achieve roughly the same objective.
Separately, the three are launching Blog News Service, apparently a news service aggregating blog content. Now the circle is complete. The aggregation and re-reporting of other’s content found on most blogs will now be tied up in a bow and spit back as a fancy news service. Intriguing indeed.
