A few years ago, a trend started in Singapore that involves making money out of blog. In other parts of the world, this trend also appeared as witnessed by many "get-rich-quick" books and e-books selling everywhere.
There was also a big rivalry between two Singapore blogvertising companies (the pioneers) Advertlets and Nuffnang with many bloggers siding with one of them, sometimes even argued about the slightest thing like late payment etc.
In reality, most bloggers don't make more than S$50 per month. Only the popular ones like Xiaxue can blog for a living. And it soon became apparent to many bloggers that they are better off working part-time in malls than blog. Blogging for money is not as attractive as many have claimed.
For advertisers, blogvertising is a novel and unique way to reach the youth population, but with risks.
If an advertiser pays on per unique visit basis, a blog owner can ask 100 of their friends to go to his website daily. Remember most youngsters got 400+ Facebook friends. Not so difficult to get your classmates, church friends and family to see the ad. While big websites are more expensive to advertise they have less tendency to do so. Youths are more mischievous, in my opinion and more attracted to money. Large sites like Insing or Yahoo also has the incentive to cheat the system, but unlikely to do so. Imagine if a staff exposed this activity - their investment will be gone: no advertiser will likely to pay for ad anymore. For blogs, the risk of getting caught is slim. He/she can just restart another blog, in minutes no less
So it'll be difficult for advertisers to know how much valid exposure they get. So is it worth the try?
