25th
More about ads...
A few of you have asked for more information about the new advertising model that we will be launching on Monday to coincide with the release of Blogrolling 2.0.
The purpose of these ads is to attempt to create a semi-sustainable business model around Blogrolling to ensure that Tucows can continue to invest in the ongoing development and maintenance of Blogrolling.
Blogrolling.com serves well over a billion blogrolls per year to tens of thousands of customers, across hundreds of thousands of blogs. It requires some fairly serious bandwidth and hardware just to keep it running. We think it deserves more than just “keep it running” and with a sustainable business model around it, I believe we can fully realize the potential of this awesome service. Blogrolling.com was one of the original blog “widget” services, and even with the recent challenges, still probably one of the largest in terms of actual usage. We really want to make sure that it gets even better.
So, we’re going to try and sell some ads.
The idea isn’t new, but we never did anything with it because we never really felt comfortable with just “sticking ads on your blog”.
Last summer, we started toying with the notion of “what if we put ads on the sites that are in the blogrolls?” i.e. positioning some sort of ad unit on the target page of the website you include in your blogrolls. We started experimenting with the idea and quickly got excited about the possibilities. We quickly decided that the best way to implement this was to give our blogrollers the capability to determine whether or not their links would spawn ads or not. We also determined that we needed to make it easy for the ad viewer to turn off the ad.
This is the vision that you see instantiated in these screen shots.
The screenshots that we posted earlier show the target page with a small banner at the top of the page that includes an unobtrusive text link, the advertising, and some navigation aids that allow the view to shut off the advertising. What isn’t pictured here is the feature that we implemented in your Blogrolling.com control panel to turn these ads off. There is a fee for turning off advertisements - $20 per year. All other Blogrolling.com features will continue to be free.
With thought this was a fair trade. If you want to use Blogrolling.com, but not pay, then we need to make a little bit of money from the traffic to your links. If you want to use Blogrolling.com and don’t mind paying for the features, then there’s no reason for us to try and make any money from the traffic to your links.
I hope this outline provides you with a better idea of the features that we’re releasing on Monday, how the advertising/subscription model works and some of our motivation for structuring things this way. Of course, if you have any questions, please let us know - we’re on twitter @blogrolling and love to hear from our customers.
(btw, we’re introducing a couple of new features on Monday that will make it much easier to get in touch with us as well…)
