Tag Archives: advertising

January 10, 2013 · 8:00 am

Advertising in this blog

I started this blog in February 2010 as theblogbyjavier.wordpress.com . Sometime later I purchased an upgrade from WordPress acquiring the domain theblogbyjavier.com (initially for 25 $ per year, a bit expensive, though comfortable), that is why you don’t see the wordpress even if the blog is hosted in WordPress.com .

Among the conditions of WordPress to provide free hosting is that no advertising shall be included in the blog. However, you might have seen some advertisements at the bottom of the posts along these years. “How can that be?” When WordPress mentions no advertising, that means no ads included by the blogger (i.e. me), but WordPress has been indeed including ads from time to time. This is made if the blogger is not purchasing the option “No Ads“, for 30$ per year. I did not purchase it.

Some weeks ago I received an inquiry from a British advertising agency asking whether I would be interested in selling some advertising space. I knew it was against WordPress conditions and this blog is not aimed at being a profitable operation, thus I would not accept the offer. Nevertheless, I exchanged a couple of emails with the agent to know more about the proposal.

The offer consisted of including a link behind a word in one of my blog posts (a single word in a single post). The link would direct the reader to the advertised company. This is what they call unobtrusive advertising (it is funny that at the same time, a Spanish leading blogger, Enrique Dans, also wrote a post criticizing this kind of advertising practices in “¿En pleno 2012 y aún con estas tonterías?“ – in Spanish).

The proposal for that single link exceeded 100 $. This surprised me. I had previously researched how much one could expect to earn via Google AdSense depending on the traffic of a website, and the order of magnitude for a blog with the traffic of this one was below 100 $ per year.

Once I had left the offer aside, I took a look again about advertising possibilities within WordPress conditions, and I found out about a new program: WordAds.

This beta program had been running for over a year. Bloggers could apply for it and they would be accepted into it if the blog met some conditions. I applied. Few days later I got the confirmation that theblogbyjavier.com was accepted into the program as I announced it in Twitter:

The reader, you, will find some ads at the end of some posts. The same that happened beforehand, as I had not purchased the “No Ads” option. The only difference: now, I will earn some cash out of them. I don’t expect (nor intend) that sum to be big, but it will hopefully pay for the 26$ a year that the domain costs now. I will further comment when I start to see revenues.

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February 11, 2011 · 8:00 am

A380, a game-changer

Probably you remember having seen in some magazines ads paid by airlines showing their luxury A380 cabins. Singapore Airlines was the first one in launching this kind of branding campaigns.

According to the definition by the Business Dictionary: “Branding aims to establish a significant and differentiated presence in the market that attracts and retains loyal customers.”

Few days ago, I received an email with publicity from a company that operates the A380. As you can see, they go a step beyond: they now use the A380 not only for branding but for advertising a concrete product, a specific flight. In one of the destinations offered you may see a label indicating that the flight is served by an A380.

Ad: flight served by an A380.

From the Wikipedia: “Advertising is a form of communication intended to persuade an audience to purchase or take some action upon products, ideas, or services.”

If they use it there must be a reason behind. I have heard from colleagues that, in fact, the companies already operating it in some of their routes are noticing that repeatedly the connections offered by an A380 show higher passenger load factor or occupancy rates than the same connections when offered by a different aircraft.

I have never seen anything like this before. It could have happened when the B-747 entered into service in the 70’s, but I was not here then; I didn’t witness it. It doesn’t happen now; not with the 747 nor with other aircraft. I certainly do not base my buying decisions, when I have to flight within Europe, on whether the airline operates a B-737 or an A320 (maybe I should!). But exactly this is happening in the case of the A380. And airlines are profiting from it.

In a previous post I wrote about the difference in current forecasts for the A380 that Airbus and Boeing report (Boeing has steeply reduced its reported forecast in the past decade). If the appeal of the aircraft continues to bring customers in, we could have a reason to believe that in end the orders figure of A380 maybe rather high. Only time and the market will let us know.

In its website, Airbus dubs the A380 as game-changer. One could expect this when a company is talking about one of its products, however when others are basing its branding and advertising on it, we seem to be really facing a game-changer.

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