Business Media Blog: B2B Online Could Go Ultra niche

Friday, December 05, 2008

B2B Online Could Go Ultra niche

A US review of research by Technorati, the blog search engine, claims that most Blogs carry advertising and that average revenue/year is $6000 with some of the uber blogs making $75000 a year.

The numbers are small, but growing fast. This blog, which has a mostly UK audience is much smaller and makes next to nothing from advertising. In part this is because the Google ads are often not very relevant to this very specialist audience.

As regional newspapers wrestle with the concept of ultra local advertising, is there an opportunity in b2b to learn something from this approach and to create a network of business to business specialist blogs and micro sites where the ads are sold on a "classified" model? Advertisers can match their advertising to the audience and select which blogs they wish to appear on. This opens up access to highly relevant audiences not normally available. How would you reach the audience of this blog otherwise? I don't sell ads and the Google system is not sufficently targeted for this specialist group. Only a handful of sites and blogs write about the UK B2B sector and certainly none mainstream media portals bother much with it. And yet, small though it is, there are many suppliers to our industry who would happily pay to reach you. (In case you didn't know most of you are pretty grown up execs in the b2b industry.)

Let's call this B2B idea "Ultra Niche".

The advertising is highly targeted, inexpensive and very effective. It encourages the growth of specialist writing and offers great ROI for advertisers at a low cost. It's a credit crunching idea!

In a larger way Federated Media has built a substantial business in the US using a variation of this thought.

Mmmm.