9 responses so far ↓

• 1 Ryan // May 27, 2008 at 9:24 am

  This issue is near and dear to my heart. I want/need money to make Catavino better, but the problem is objectivity. Google offers a non-intrusive solution for most bloggers, since the ads have become almost a prerequisite to owning a blog. I actually had one new blogger ask me if they had to have them on their site!

  I do think we need to find ways for the wineries to use blogs as advertising platforms, though until I can afford to set up an independent ad review board, I can’t seem to find a way to accept them and remain independent.

  A better question I think is, if we don’t rate wine, (which we do), and only educate, why wouldn’t we be able to take money from wineries? Thoughts?

• 2 Alex // May 27, 2008 at 9:51 am

  Ryan - I think you should have a chat to the Wine Doctor (http://www.thewinedoctor.com/). He has focussed advertising and sponsorship on the site, and it’s unobtrusive (not horrible floatovers or anything like that!).

• 3 Robert McIntosh // May 27, 2008 at 9:57 am

  very good point Alex - I should be in touch with Chris about stuff anyway and I’ll ask him for his thoughts on this

• 4 Jimmy Pons // May 27, 2008 at 3:44 pm

  I belive people understand that we have to do some money. Blogging, podcasting is a lot of work, and there is a moment that at least you want to pay the bills, the hosting, etc. We never w’ll get rich but at least…. get some money

  It will be much better if its a independent enterprise who gets in charge of this, the problem is the money will not be enough, I think its a matter of time to when one day wine blogs will be more readed an the advertising and sponsorship will be more easy. All the beginnigs are dificult. ,-)

• 5 Chris Kissack // May 27, 2008 at 7:35 pm

  Hi. Thanks for contacting me about this Robert, and for comments made so far. I do have some thoughts on this.

  I suppose there are two broad categories of advertising, paid for banners and performance-related-links such as affiliate banners, Google adsense, etc.

  I started off with a few affiliate banners but the income was small and it was always my intention to move to paid-for banners. Having said that, it was four years before I actually had a paying sponsor, when the late Roger Leach of http://www.finewinelist.com came on board. Even now, with eight years of running The Winedoctor behind me and 1500+ pages online I still have only a few sponsors. You have to remember that wine retailers have limited advertising budgets, and although online advertising is cheap compared to advertising in print the retailers will not be able to advertise on every site. There are at least two other large wine sites in the UK, both written/edited by guys who are now full-time wine writers and they will always be strong contenders when a retailer is looking for somewhere to place an advert. So competition is stiff in this sort of arena, and the resulting revenue generated is not huge. Having said that, because I am not full-time wine writing and not dependent on the site’s income, perhaps I am more free to put site design and my readers above issues of banners and revenue.

  The lack of revenue doesn’t bother me as the content of the site and my readers have always been my number one concern. I think of my site as a source of free information that happens to have a few ads to pay the way, rather than a revenue-generator based around wine information. It isn’t a good business model! Other sites do generate a lot more income from paid-for banners, but the more banners they have the more obtrusive they become, sometimes with several flashing banners lined up on a page. I don’t want my site to look like this, no matter how much revenue it brings in! I have always designed my site so that advertising was noticeable (above the ‘fold’) but never annoying (one banner per page – except homepage, always 120 x 60 size, no pop-ups or floats); quality of content and low ‘annoyance’ for the reader always comes first. I think my advertisers understand this, and hopefully they place banners on the site because the quality is good and the readers naturally interested, among other reasons.

  I don’t find objectivity to be a problem, I write about the wines as I see them. If the advertiser doesn’t like the opinion then perhaps they won’t come back at the end of their agreed period of advertising, but again this doesn’t bother me. You have to give honest opinions as you are judged on them by the readers. Readers surely expect that; retailers that submit wine for assessment – even paying advertisers – must surely accept that also.

  I have toyed briefly with the likes of Google Adsense but didn’t find the income was significant. Others would perhaps have more success. I also didn’t like the size and shape of the Adsense banners, the lack of control over appearance and the products being advertised, and so I soon stopped. As above, I wanted to put site design and readability – the readers - first.

• 6 Robert McIntosh // May 27, 2008 at 9:23 pm

  So good to hear your point of view Chris, and as honest and direct as I expected (of course).

  Would you be prepared to take advertising from ANY winery or wine company (assuming they are reputable, of course)? What if they chose to advertise a single wine (rather than a retailer)? Do you think it might appear to be a personal endorsement, and therefore a conflict of interest?

  As you say, there is so little money around for this sector at the moment, that mostly this is not a daily concern, … yet. But I wonder whether there are things we should decide in advance not to do, or new opportunities we could offer jointly that would attract new advertisers, that we could discuss in a forum such as the EWBC?

• 7 Chris Kissack // Jun 2, 2008 at 10:51 pm

  Firstly sorry for the tardy response, I had a deadline to meet today and I had to put everything else on hold.
  Yes, I think I would take advertising from any company that was wine related. I have turned interested parties wanting to advertise holiday lets because I didn’t see any relation to wine. Some of my current advertisers change their banner from time to time, and sometimes we do have ads selling a single wine. I think that the ability of the reader to pick out whether there is a conflict of interest shouldn’t be underestimated. I also think the ad and the wine need to be more closely associated if it is to constitute a conflict than they would be on my site as it stands currently.

• 8 Philip James // Jun 18, 2008 at 8:49 pm

  Ryan Opaz asked me to talk about the new tool that Snooth launched this week.

  However, I wanted to give you my take on blog monetization. Its a common theme, but until a site has ‘critical mass’ then banner advertising doesn’t really pay sufficient CPMs. Google Adsense is a great way to make a few dollars here and there, but its rates are even lower than cheap banner ad rates.

  Part of the problem is that ‘critical mass’ for advertising is a really high number - millions of page views for sure, which really doesn’t help anyone in our industry.

  There are alternatives, and several of the previous responders have talked about private sponsorship. I’m avoiding any ethical discussions here and just talking monetization. If a blogger strikes a deal with a local store, wine brand or some other interested party the rates could easily be 4x banner rates, and 10x google rates.

  The hardest thing with this is the effort involved in finding and keeping these relationships alive.

  This brings me back to where i started: Snooth has for some time now been trying to work closer and closer with wine bloggers, and this week we released a tool that we’d developed in conjunction with several wine bloggers.

  I’ll describe it, but its not my place to review it: its a tool that allows bloggers to create in-line contextual links from their site to specific wines on snooth, and to get paid for referring traffic. You an read about it here: http://www.snooth.com/talk/topic/new-blogger-tools/

  Thank you

  PS. Sorry to Rob McIntosh who’s probably heard me talk about this 7 times now!

• 9 Filippo Ronco // Jul 22, 2008 at 12:20 pm

  Hi all.
  Robert asked me to put something here and I’m glad to follow any of his suggestions.

  I’m a wine publisher from 1999 with an old but well known - in Italy - wine portal : http://www.tigulliovino.it, with a new social network (www.vinix.it) and with a brand new wine & food related adv company.

  Across these last 8-9 years I had the chanche to try a lot of kind of monetizations passing through sponsorships, pay per click pay per impressions, pay per performance and so on. During these years I’ve given a lot and I’ve got a few. What I’ve learned is that if you’re alone - it doesn’t make any difference if you’re big or small - you can’t aim to gain a lot of money from advertising.

  Always adv budgets have been managed by agencies. If you want to have some income from your work as publisher (website or blogger) you need help and cohoperation.

  This is the reason why I’ve started in 2007 http://www.vinoclic.it/index-english.htm the first “wine & food only” related adv company. We started in 15 and today we’re more than 50 publishers some from uk, spain, usa.

  One of the first things we focused on at the beginning was the ethical problem. We decided to give us some ethical rules that should have been followed by vinoclic and any publisher who ask ed to join the network . The point is that to sell advertising you need to be trusted first. If you are trusted, advertisers has one more reason to advertise on you or on the network you choose.

  These are some of our rules :

  1) advertisers selection (no spam or rubbish-ads)
  2) only display ads as core business
  3) different projects - if they will come - will be presented, time by time, to each publisher and approved.
  4) all publishers can ask that a certain campaign shouldn’t run on their own blogs or websites and vinoclic must correct the distribution accordingly.
  5) nobody can publish any payed content

  Above all, I think that advertising is not evil but it could be if you are not transparent with your readers. Disclaimers are a good way if you think to talk about something that you are payed for. In other words, your trust level depends on you first. It’s not advertising to be evil or not. It depends on you and on your ethical rules.

  I’ll come to EWBC to talk with you about the opportunity to work together with vinoclic advertising network and to answer any questions about advertising online in the wine & food world (technicalities included if you like).

  I asked Robert to help me with my poor english and I hope we can share a little speech together about advertising online.

  Bye, Fil.

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