The new trend among probloggers – Ad Real Estate themes

Hey did you notice it? Seems like everything in the blogosphere is viral? No, I’m not talking about “i-phone reviews” by someone who even haven’t seen one or “I hate Aglocco because you didn’t pay me ” campaigns ….(Yeah! I made that up).

Did you notice the new “Ad – crazy” syndrome happening?  yeah, poor souls like you and me are spared, this has only got to do with the “ProBloggers” who have sponsors waiting in Queue for an ad-spot.

I first saw John Chow do it, then came in Darren, then John TP, then DailyBlogtips, then my buddy Kevin Bloggingtips. All of them have gone for a site template redesign and opted for a theme with more importance to ads. Particularly the square button (125 x 125)ones. What’s with this now?  

Darren has pulled off AdSense ads completely from his blog. So gone are the days when bloggers picked templates based on how it would accommodate AdSense ads and how the background colours blended with your AdSense ads.

Today we have templates that have 30% of it’s real-estate reserved for sponsored ads. In fact, these ads give them more money than Google Ads. When Google ads give them a dollar or two only when someone is clicking it, these image/banners ads are paid for impressions. And with probloggers enjoying huge traffic, it’s but natural for them to opt for these ads to AdSense.

An issue that’s raised (necessarily or unnecessary you decide) is the effect on user friendliness. It’s a fact that these blogs give more importance to advertising than the content, and this sudden change have even confused some readers. The bloggers argument is that sponsors like to show their ads ‘above the fold’ and hence they had to push the content to the lower half pane. Fair enough! John Chow has gone to extreme that almost all of this above fold region is either ads or promotion.

Another argument from the bloggers is that – regular readers always use a reader to read the posts. So the ads won’t bother them much. While the sponsors are targeting on organic traffic and “stoppers-by” from search engines, this is an excellent strategy where the ads are delivered only to the right kind of audience.

Now, that all probloggers are into “Ad-crazy” syndrome, I don’t think it’s far when we have Problogger and JohnChow look alike free themes on Wordpress.

Are you going for a redesign? Not me (atleast, until I have sponsors queuing up) !

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