TechCrunch can be a great source of news for bloggers, and I highly recommend checking it out from time to time, as that is where I found this latest story, which Michael Arrington writes about Technorati, and the potential they have to launch a blogger advertising network.

That change foreshadows the upcoming shift – which places the Technorati site itself as an anchor in a new blog advertising network.

Advertising networks are popular right now – Glam recently raised $85 million after transitioning, seemingly overnight, from a small web property focused on women to selling advertising for a variety of similarly-focused publishers. And John Battelle’s FM Publishing, an advertising network focused on technology blogs, recently hired investment bank Savvian to help them raise money or sell after turning down a $100 million buyout offer.

Technorati will certainly be competing head to head with FM, although sources say they’ll focus on the long tail of the market as well (FM only takes larger sites). The network will be a self-serve exchange for bloggers (and other publishers) as well as advertisers. Ad units will include both display and text ads, and will allow units to be charged on both a CPM and CPC basis. This self-service model looks a lot more like Adbrite than Glam or FM.

The first question I have to ask myself is, do we need another advertising network? While I think it is great that more companies want to get into helping bloggers monetize their efforts, aren’t there enough choices already? What could Technorati bring to the table that is going to knock my socks off with excitement?

I guess the biggest advantage they might have would be to monetize lower traffic sites, which is something that most advertising companies won’t help bloggers with.

I can’t wait to hear more about this, but it seems like everyone is wanting to create an advertising network in hopes of capitalizing on the tens of millions of blogs out there in the blogosphere. It almost seems to me like every company is thinking “if we could make a penny off of every blog, we’d be rich!”

Would you use Technorati as your advertising network?

Originally posted on March 3, 2008 @ 2:38 pm