Your private ad sales going down?

Well, same here. For some reason, it seems that all the private advertisers have gone to Neverland. Maybe it’s the weakening economy or maybe it’s something else. But surprisingly enough, with the usage of more and more affiliate networks on my blogs, less private advertisers mean more money for me overall. How? Affiliate money! And that just might be the reason.

You see, ever since blog networks came out, big spenders had always been going for blog networks. It is much easier to handle a lot of blogs under one co-ordination other than co-coordinating the whole thing with a lot of independent bloggers. So because of that, big advertisers would slowly trend towards blog networks over time.

And the ones that don’t? Well, most of them are having their own affiliate programs going for them. I mean, see, if you pay a blogger $50 to run a 125×125 banner ad for a full month and if you’re not entirely sure of that blogger actually giving you a good ROI, why not go for an affiliate program? If you pay $25 per new signup, the blogger who can deliver more signups will obviously earn more than $50 and the company is not going to pay for blogs that pull up misleading blog stats and don’t deliver what they ought to be delivering right? It’s lucrative to both publishers and advertisers alike!

And guess what! If they can’t make the initial investment to run their own affiliate network, they can join a network like Pepperjam that would do the job for them, including click tracking, payout handling and so on. Running an affiliate program for a product had never been this easy. And what’s more attractive than a $25 per signup affiliate program? A lifetime revenue sharing affiliate network, of course. More and more bloggers tend to dig this option and there are now a lot of affiliate networks giving publishers lifetime revenue. Something that a monthly advertisement can not bring to the table.

So at the end of the day, what I can see is that unless an independent blogger is a prominent face in a specific niche, going can get really rough for him or her. It’s survival of the fittest you know. But as a direct result, internet advertising field will be subjected to unprecedented growth. Less fraud, and foolproof Return-on-Investment means that advertisers are virtually willing to throw their money at you, if you can deliver the results.

So, if your private advertisers are disappearing by the week, it might not be all bad.