Jim Coudal, renowned designer at Coudal Partners, gave a presentation at the Future of Online Advertising (FOOA) in New York on 7th June 2007, about one of their businesses, which is called The Deck.

The Deck is a network of blogs all focused on a very specific niche audience of creative, design and web professionals (people like us). They have a unique approach to online advertising that is quite fascinating:

• They will only accept advertising for a product/service that they have actually tried and that they feel comfortable recommending to their audience. They’re not asking for freebies, they saying that if they don’t want to buy it, then it is probably not of interest to their audience either.
• They only show one ad on one web page. That’s it. They guarantee there won’t be any other ads on the page at the same time.
• The ads can only be a very specific format: 120 x 90 pixels with up to 75 characters of text:

  

• The don’t price on the standard CPM (Cost Per Thousand) model, instead they charge by time (fixed rate per day or per month). They believe that advertisers are paying “Cost Per Influence”. The blogs in their network are extremely well regarding and trusted within the industries, and then the audience themselves are likely to be highly influential on other people, therefore, they believe their situation deserves a different model.

In this situation, I think they have a strong case for taking a different approach. Let’s face it, creatives/designs/developers are tricky to deal with and always won’t to do things differently so it makes sense that they have advertising focused on being in a form that will be well received. For the blogs in The Deck, who are likely to be owned by people who value the aesthetic of their site above all else, they get surety that the advertising will work well with their design and their audience. It seems to be working well for them.

I predict that there will be a lot be more niche (pronounced nitch in the US by the way) blog advertising networks, however, I think they will struggle if they try to go down the road that The Deck has. The buying of media space and the actual placement of ads is becoming more and more automated and standardised, and if everyone has their own models and manual processes, this will be problematic and most likely result in the advertiser going elsewhere.