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Advertisers buy impressions in bulk. They always have and for the foreseeable future they will continue to do so.

Why?

Simply because advertisers play the 1% game. They hope that out of hundreds of thousands of impressions that they snap up, 1% of these will convert into sales.

It’s a mediocre game at best, but as it stands it is the only game in town.

Allen Stern wrote a great piece in response to something Robert Scoble wrote about advertisers being more concerned with branding and authority than they are about traffic. I have to side with Allen on this one.

An Advertisers Dilemma

There are few advertisers in the market today who can parse something as complex as “blog authority.” They simply do not have the language to do it. Which makes sense, since the tools that we use to rank ourselves are so piss poor as it stands.

Is this a good thing? Not hardly. What it does is it forces any blogger who wants to play the game to switch his or her focus from generating “great work” towards the banality of generating eyeballs. This often leads to sub-par content and the kind of me too dribble that often makes up the pages of Techmeme. It is, however, the reality of the market in which we work.

Is there something that can be done about it? Certainly.

For bloggers, it’s time to figure out what your vertical really is. If you aren’t pushing 100,000 pageviews a day then you need to figure what audiences you are attracting. Advertisers do care about traffic in a general sense, but what they really want is to play anything other than the 1% game. If you write a design blog and your audience jumps at all the new design ads that you run, smart advertisers will seek you out for this reason alone. Find a niche that converts well for you and court advertisers for your power to convert.

For advertisers. If you aren’t in the position to do huge network buys, it’s time for you to take some time to do your homework. You can save a lot of money if you choose blogs that convert well for your product. Ask questions, learn what you can from the author and look around the blog to see if its the type of place you see your brand converting well on. Playing the numbers game is great, but if those numbers don’t convert it can be an expensive error.

Web 2.0 Roundup

For the large institutional advertisers, it’s still far too early to move away from the impressions game. Until we come up with a better language, traffic is still the only number we can at least partially agree on. For the smaller buyers, however, it might be time to do a little more legwork. More than likely you’ll find that the rewards are well worth the extra work.

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