In January of this year I made a bet with members of our team. The bet was that dollar for dollar the long tail and sponsored posts were a better advertising investment than display ads on an “A-List” blog. I knew what the performance was through our network and had seen what the “A-Listers” were charging for display ads. I decided to plunk down some money and see if I was right.
I first tried to buy advertising on TechCrunch to prove my point,
but when Mike Arrington declined I went looking for a comparable property. I thought about Mashable and even Calacanis.com, but we ultimately purchased a one month campaign on the ultra popular tech website ReadWriteWeb.com, of which I a personally a fan and consider to be “A-List” material . We decided to promote the then new IZEARanks.com website we had recently launched. The one month 125×125 display ad ran us $3,000.
We also purchased 220 Sponsored Posts at a cost of $2970 including all the fees an outside advertiser would pay. The PPP Opportunities for this comparison were Run of Network, allowing virtually any blogger to write about us, no matter how small the blog. All posts included in-post disclosure badges and no-follow links.
Here are the results:
ReadWriteWeb.com
Over the one month period our media buy on ReadWriteWeb delivered 725 visits according to Google Analytics.
PayPerPost.com
Over the same one-month period sponsored posts on PPP network blogs delivered 696 visits from the no-follow in-post links, and an additional 136 visits from the required disclosure badge. The PayPerPost total for the same first month was 832 visits.
One of the benefits I have touted about sponsored posts is the fact that they deliver value long after your posts are paid for. I made two purchases on PPP, one on February 5 and one on February 7th. Those media buys are still paying dividends three months later, adding another 105 clicks for a total of 937 clicks so far. When my money ran out on my ReadWriteWeb media buy I stopped seeing the benefits immediately.
This is a graph from SocialSpark demonstrating CPC over time for a Sponsored Post campaign.
If you equate Visits to CPC we can start to compare our two media buys. ReadWriteWeb ran $4.31/click while PPP has run $3.16/click to date (realize that this will continue to go down over time). I will admit, those PPP numbers are some of the worst I have seen in a sponsored post campaign. Typically we see a CPC in the range of $.60-1.20 after the first 30 days, but I decided to do this RON without any segmentation. I should have been more selective and chosen some segmentation.
While creating SocialSpark we recognized that there is a fundamental
flaw with advertiser value representation in PPP. We allow advertisers to create
opportunities in the system and drive traffic to their site, but only report back clicks received from sponsored posts. The result is a lot of
free traffic for the advertiser that is never reflected in their PPP stats or in their site analytics. In addition to the 937 clicks above, a bare minimum of 220 bloggers
were exposed to the site (most likely 500+). That adds at least another 220 clicks to our numbers (TOTAL 1157) and drops our CPC lower.
Engaging the Blogger
Clicks are one thing, but engagement is another. 220 Bloggers took the time to write 250 words or more about our Opportunity. They had to visit the site, explore it, potentially sign-up and write an educated post about their findings. Display ads will never drive that kind of engagement.
Engaging the reader
Not only did we directly engage 220 bloggers, but our blog reader engagement was much higher as well. On average a reader delivered from ReadWriteWeb spent 2:58 on our site, with a 38.90% bounce rate. A reader delivered from a PPP network blog spent 5:39 on our site, with a 21.26% bounce rate. This is because people clicking links in sponsored posts have a genuine interest in the site they are clicking through to.
Conclusion : The LongTail Rules
While “A-List” blogs may be able to deliver high volumes of display advertising inventory, sponsored posts on hundreds of “longtail” blogs are capable of delivering advertisers a stronger value short term, and offer a long term value not available through any form of display ads offered by the A-Listers.
Well….. Maybe. Here is The Real Question.
The thing I still don’t know is what happens when you mix an “A-List” blog with sponsored content. ReadWriteWeb could very well have blown these numbers out of the water with a single post on their ultra-popular blog. Its a great blog with great content, I would probably click on an honest sponsored post with clear disclosure.
If any “A-Listers” are up for a little experiment I would love to hear from you. Robert Scoble, Pete Cashmore, heck…. Jason Calacanis drop me a line. Maybe it’s the network, maybe it’s the ad unit. Right now we only know that display ads on big blogs suck just as bad as they do on other big sites. I am more than happy to drop $3,000 on a single post and see what happens compared to a $3000 SocialSpark Campaign launched at the same time.
