Analysis: Why Some Web 2.0 Sites Will Never Attract Big Ad Dollars

Published: September 17, 2007, 8:45 pm

Tags: advertising, marketing, research, search, social networking, web 2 0, weblogs, commercial intent, measurement, metrics

Accountability - e.g. a company's return on investment in advertising - is an evergreen topic in the marketing community. Naturally, when it comes to the emerging sphere of Web 2.0 sites, advertisers want to sleep easy knowing that their money is generating a return. So with US ad spending on social networks expected to reach $2.5 billion by 2011, this is a good time to poke at conventional wisdom with hard data. It's not pretty. Based on a informal analysis, my belief is that many online communities, bloggers, social networks will never attract a critical mass of advertisers because they are not set up properly to attract visitors who have a commercial intent to buy products and services. Online media is not sold this way now, but I bet it will be in the very near future. Today, most advertisers size up community sites, blogs and social networks using traditional media buying models - namely, reach and frequency. Unfortunately, the reality is that many Web 2.0 sites,

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