New segment for advertisers : blogs, social networks and wiki's

Initially ignored by advertisers, blogs, social networks and wiki's became a tempting land for marketing and advertising. Fact that determines companies marketing departments to turn a part of the advertising budgets in this direction.

On Boing Boing , indicated by Technorati as the most popular blog in the world, in the right side of the page appeared a little ad to Intel products. In the same time, Endgaget, the well-known blog about gadgets hosts an ad about a pair of Motorola headsets. Blogs have truly became a good place for advertisers, the sums invested in these raising very much.

More and more companies started to turn attention and marketing strategies to the online environment , that including this kind of websites, considered non-conventional for ads displaying. Blogs, social networks like MySpace , online games or virtual worlds like Second Life, will attract in the next years a larger and larger percent from the budget allocated by executives from the online marketing domain.

In present, one third of the large companies allocate about 14% of the publicity budget, according to McKinsey. The company (McKinsey) , an expert in consulting of management took a survey about the online marketing strategy , questioning 410 marketing executives from public and private companies all over the world, representing various domains from retail to energy distribution and telecommunications. A first conclusion of the study is that, unlike the previous years, the online environment represents a more important component of the advertising strategy of these companies.

A big part of the managers admitted that online is important for advertising, and over 66% of them go to online marketing strategies for their segment of market. In present , more than 33% of the respondents allocate more than 10% of the publicity budget for online promovation and ads, but in 3 years the figures will double.

According to the survey company Piper Jaffray, there will be invested 81.1 billion dollars for online advertising until 2011. Now, the most effective method seems to be the e-mail, which for 83% percent of the questioned companies takes 31% of the total advertising budget. Also, 73% of the companies consider that banners displayed on websites are a good strategy for increasing the brand's fame, allocating about a third of the budget for this.

But the big bang will appear on social networks and virtual worlds like Second Life, and wiki's - systems of articles were any user can write free copyrighted articles.

Places for advertisers

Beside search engines like Google or Yahoo!, many companies started to look for publicity on other types of websites.

- Blogs : Online personal journals became a good marketing method, some of them being real business for bloggers.

- Online games : Ads displayed on gaming websites reach a very numerous public. Online games, dedicated to consoles that can be interconnected on networks or multi- player servers that can be played by users all over the world on the Internet, have a public of tens or hundreds of thousands players.

- Podcasts : Online audio journals or videocasts are actually a multimedia form of blogs. The advantage about them when it comes to ads it's that they can be shared on Youtube or iTunes, very popular online content places.

- Social networks : The most popular social networks like MySpace and Facebook, have together hundreds of millions of users, on which there are details like preferences, hobbies or consumer preferences. This kind of companies are very precious for companies that want to advertise here.

- Virtual worlds : The best example is Secopnd Life, a online 3D space built like a copy of the real world and where a lot of companies opened virtual bureaus.

- Wiki's : Like blogs or social networks these systems have a large public. This can be a reason for which companies can find websites like Wikipedia.com a very good advertising space.