A couple months back BlogAds began bundling blogs together into topical networks, offering advertisers a way to spread a campaign across many blogs in a specific market niche with a single ad buy. The concept got rolling in late February with a network of New York blogs, and regional networks for Philadelphia, North Carolina, Los Angeles and New England soon followed. There are now topical networks that aggregate blogs about TV, economics, food, Evangelical Christianity and baseball. The newest network is the Gadget Blogs Network, which includes our GameJournalism.com.
In each case, the network has been "catalyzed" by an individual blogger who takes the lead in organizing member sites. Amy Langfield got the ball rolling with the NYC blogs. BlogAds founder Henry Copeland describes the opportunity on his blog:
"Smart bloggers small and large agree that the ONLY way to grab a significant chunk of the $250 billion spent annually on advertising in the US is to band together. What's been true of blog content will also be true of blogads: a single blog is an easily ignored ant - 100,000 ants together is an unignorable hive."The network concept is familiar, having been pioneered by the Web 1.0 banner ad networks such as DoubleClick. But DoubleClick didn't care a fig about your site if it had less than 1 million page views a month. The BlogAds nanonetworks offer a model that can work for both niche blogs with modest traffic as well as advertisers, who realize that the targeting available through blogs is a better investment than the CPM-based campaigns of yore.