ChasNote

Nope! Not for publishers, anyway.

Natali at TechCrunch profiled BlogKits, a start-up “with the goal of helping to monetize the blogosphere. The company matches smaller-potato blogs to advertisers and provides a risk-free way for both to work together.”

As expressed by several readers in comments to the post, BlogKits sounds like a fresh coat of paint on the affiliate marketing programs from the late 1990s. Risk-free to advertisers, certainly. In the affiliate model, advertising exposure on 3rd party sites is free and clicks to the advertiser’s website are free. The advertiser only pays if a customer from that 3rd party site clicks AND buys something from that advertiser, all in a short span of time. (Usually 3rd party sites don’t get credit for customers who click and browse, but come back later the the advertiser’s site to buy.)

Affiliate programs are risk-free to a website publisher only if that publisher doesn’t have other options to monetize that traffic to his or her site. Some ad networks (Tacoda, Tribal Fusion, Advertising.com, ContextWeb, etc.) will pay even “small potato” sites on a cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM) basis — a guaranteed fee for every thousand times the publisher displays an ad, whether or not visitors click on the ad. In this model, the publisher gets paid by advertisers who want exposure to a particular audience, even if members of that audience who aren’t in “impulse buy” mode. For other sites, Google’s AdSense program is more lucrative. While Google pays publishers based for clicks (not impressions), the effect of their context-matching algorithms and pool of hundreds of thousands of advertisers is some amount of money for every thousand impressions of their text ads. Google demands that advertisers pay them for every click over to the advertisers’ site, whether or not that visitor buys something on the spot.

In either case, publishers of all sizes can make money through CPM advertising networks or Google’s CPC network. Swapping in BlogKits ad units means giving up revenue from other channels; if it doesn’t work, nothing lost by the advertiser, but the publisher may have left money on the table.