Robert McLaws and the others from Interscape started LonghornBlogs.com 5 months ago, and the popularity has been so overwhelming that they have exceeded their current infrastructure, and need to spend some serious cash to keep up with demand. The problem is that LonghornBlogs is a free community site, and is totally financed thru Interscape. There are a couple standard ways to support a free community site, get backing from a major vendor (in this case Microsoft), add banner ads to the website, or create a Paypal donation account. Robert doesn’t want to accept money from Microsoft (and I think Microsoft wants this site to be independent, too), and doesn’t want to add banner adds. He has a couple other ideas, and is soliciting for others.
Eventually the major blog sites out there are going to run into the same problem. Scoble has mentioned that he is also interested in new ideas. I’ve been thinking about this stuff for a while. Although I have no problems with my current hosting provider, this type of stuff is interesting to me. What I’d suggest is to throw out the traditional website financing ideas and take advantage of the blogging model. The majority of regulars to a blog use aggregators, so banner ads don’t work in that situation. Plus, banner ads do not wind up in web search engines. The best way to generate revenue for a blog site is via a blog entry. They get index in web search engines, get included in the main feeds, and can be posted to a specific category. If the post is done in good taste, and is done in the same style as the rest of the site, it can avoid the spam tag. What that means is that in a site like mine or LonghornBlogs, it would need to be done as code example or explain what the product is about (in typical blogging style). I’ve posted entries advertising different products that I use on my blog, and have done it not to get paid but to help the community learn about some of these cool tools. I’ve been approached by companies (who will remain nameless) trying to get me to blog about their product, so to me this is a natural evolution. The problem with using this approach in a community site arrangement is that the community has to agree not to sidestep our benefactors and not write blog entries for companies that may pay to advertise on the community site. That said, it should be alright to discuss things that the community doesn’t like about the advertised products.
What I’d suggest is to create a separate blog category (or feed) that is also included in the main feed, and post somewhere between 7 to 15 ads per month via that blog. The category or blog also needs to be clearly marked as paid for advertising. If you charge somewhere between $100 and $250 per entry (the fewer the entries the higher the cost), you could generate about $1500 a month which should cover the cost of hosting the community site. Each entry should be kept up for a limited amount of time (say 3 months), and then deleted. The advantages this system has over banners is that everyone gets to see the ads (via website and rss viewers), and it also contributes to the “Google Juice” of a product (which as bloggers we use to our advantage all the time anyway). Also long as the ads are done in a similar style to the rest of the site, it will fit in with the site and not take away from it.
DonXML Demsak