Rojo's blog exchange

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17 Feb 2006

Rojo’s launching a blog ad exchange. Big deal.

I know a thing or two about ad exchanges. There’s a lot of time spent supporting people who aren’t making you any money. The vast majority of participants know nothing about advertising. They expect a 20% click through rate even though their ad copy is the same as everyone else’s: “My personal blog. It’s funny.” Or some variation thereof. They complain when the exchange ad is offensive, but everyone has a different view of what’s offensive. Before Pheedo bought Blogsnob, I spent 10 hours a week policing ads to ensure they were blogs, and didn’t contain profanity, porn and other prohibited content.

Rojo plans to show one paid ad for every exchange ad. Good luck with that. When people run paid advertising on their site, they expect to get paid. There’s also a problem with ad quality. The low quality of the exchange ads will probably detract from the click through rates on the paid ads. So I hope they aren’t selling those on a CPC or CPA basis.

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