Advertising for the tail

A few years ago I was translating one practically classical article for today on the distribution of readers in blogs. The theoretical foundations were classic - Vilfredo Pareto (Vilfredo Pareto), George Zipf (George Zipf), Jacob Nielsen ... In short, it all came down to simple thoughts - who started earlier, get an order of magnitude more chance to create a successful (in this case - visited ) blog, and 80% of visits get 20% of blogs. I will cite one quotation from that article: “... blogs with a small number of readers that make up the long tail of the graph are aimed at dialogue. In a world where most blogs have below-average traffic, the size of an audience cannot be the only measure of success . ” Well, we are witnessing the development of this particular concept. The basis of abstraction under the loud name of Web 2.0 was precisely communication, dialogue, the ability of an ordinary visitor to participate in the process. One of the really important innovations was the attention paid thereby to 80% of the already mentioned “long tail”. An important and usually forgotten detail is that in the “long tail”, at least in its middle part, a sufficiently large number of blogs and sites with high quality, fairly narrow focus and clearly defined audience are concentrated. At the same time, it is quite clear that the audience for such projects is, in principle, inferior in terms of the number of visitors to sites, say, entertainment topics. At the same time, such resources, if I may say so, have a more “qualitative” audience. A simple example: getting a link to a site on the first page of a popular entertainment portal almost guarantees an extra thousand or two unique visitors, which is good news. However, if you look at the statistics, it turns out that the time when the site was viewed by the vast majority of these visitors is extremely short. And just insignificant CPM. A link in the relevant blog of a relevant subject can result in much fewer visitors, but it will be people who will be able to evaluate the submitted materials, give interesting and professional comments and, if you have a commercial site, are much more likely to become your customers. Today we have two really large contextual advertising networks: Yandex Direct and Runner . Of course, there are many more minor services, but the scale is not that, and here the site owner often begins to wonder if the risk of cooperation with such a network is too great for him , or if he is being thrown. The problem is that now the leading Russian networks are focused on using, as advertising sites, above all, fairly large sites. Begun's requirements are quite liberal, but they also make up at least 500 unique hosts per day, while Yandex’s requirements are even stricter, and besides, Direct works only with legal entities and the Individual Entrepreneur. At the same time, the overwhelming majority of Russian-language blogs (so far) do not have an appropriate audience, even if they are quite interesting and promising niche projects. Now in the Russian market Google has become more active. Russification of services, support for morphology in requests, the opening of a Russian office, a Russian-language corporate blog and, in this context, most interesting, the emergence of rumors about the possible use of WebMoney as a means to contribute money to AdWords and withdrawal from AdSense . Those. Google, it seems, is also going to develop in Russia an already developed practice of making money on the “long tail”. Still, let's be honest, WebMoney is needed not for corporations and large firms, but for individuals and small businesses, so this assumption seems quite logical. Today, one of the problems of the Russian AdSense segment is that for the time being Russian-language advertising, especially for specific “niche” requests that are most interesting for small sites with a clearly defined audience, is very, very few. This is largely due to the complexity of buying advertising. The difficulty of withdrawing money from AdSense is also not the best way affects the popularity of the service. It is the simplification of payments and the increase in the share of Google on the Russian search and advertising market can significantly change this situation. The uncertain situation with the search results of Yandex, which has become, in general opinion, a direct consequence of an overly zealous fight against dealers , can only add to the popularity of Google and further exacerbate the likely confrontation. I asked this situation to comment on Igor Ashmanov, director of Ashmanov & Partners : Yes, in Runet now there is a completely unplowed field of sites with low traffic, of which there are hundreds of thousands. The runner and Yandex do not go to this field yet, they are afraid of cheating. That is, they are moving there, but so far along the edge - at a speed of dozens of sites per day, and this is about an order of magnitude less than it takes to take everything. But after all, whoever first got up, that and sneakers: if the webmaster has already put some contextual system on the site, and she already brings him money, then it is quite difficult to slip another one to replace him, there is an input threshold for negotiating with moderators, setting up, testing and so on. Contextual advertising is a pretty sticky service. Google decided this problem for itself several years ago - it included risks of cheating in the business scheme, regularly sues, pays fines - but it earns several billion dollars a year just on context-sensitive AdSense ads on small sites. If Yandex and Runner do not change the strategy, then there are chances that Google will capture this field in Russia. He has a lot of money, he can dump, if necessary, to occupy the market. On the other hand, while the events in Google are also developing very slowly. In my opinion, this is not the “fast” company, which all startups are at the beginning. On the other hand, if Google is now slowly moving the pieces, then it may, however, have a higher game class. Maybe when he finally offers something to Russian advertisers and webmasters, will it be an offer that cannot be refused? In general, now, contextual advertising systems appear like mushrooms after rain. I know that most of the holders of banner networks (and in general those service providers who have access to a large number of clients or users) now in one way or another include contextual modules in their development plans.