Comments on: Tim Blair’s blog goes “legit”.

By: The Editor

The Editor — Wed, 14 May 2008 02:28:51 +0000

Thanks, Jason.

By: jason

jason — Wed, 14 May 2008 01:36:00 +0000

Thanks Editor - I’ll add the link in an update and listen with interest!

By: The Editor

The Editor — Wed, 14 May 2008 00:26:52 +0000

The podcast in which we discuss Blair’s blog move is here.

By: Mark

Mark — Tue, 13 May 2008 07:42:44 +0000

Yes, that’s right, Jason. If you take a look at the type of ads that appear, they’re only relevant to Australian consumers.

By: jason

jason — Tue, 13 May 2008 05:50:47 +0000

I agree with what you’ve said there Mark. I presume Nielsen measure in that way because that’s the audience that the advertisers care about, right? I guess that the agencies like to justify media buying to clients in terms of Aussie eyeballs. Otherwise there wouldn’t be any reason to exclude o/s traffic.

Anyhow, the stuff about aussie readers refreshing is spot on, I reckon, and you’d assume he’ll also add to that Australian audience on the Tele site. Unless he doesn’t, of course…

By: Mark

Mark — Tue, 13 May 2008 05:12:33 +0000

Jason, it’s not a matter of advertisers just being “interested” in Australian traffic. The Nielsen system - which is standard for measuring all blog display ads across Australia - only counts Australian traffic. So any US traffic Tim might bring with him has no material value whatever to Newscorp, except (and here’s where it’s a little more interesting) insofar as a greater number of comments leads to more refreshes and hits by Australians.

By: jason

jason — Tue, 13 May 2008 02:31:25 +0000

WaterDragon: Who knows? That’s probably a question that only Tim could answer accurately, but I imagine that there has been some kind of quid pro quo for the extra users he’ll presumably bring to the Tele site.

There’s an interesting question though around value for money for advertisers there. Often advertisers on Australian sites are mostly interested in verifiably Australian traffic, and a lot of Blair’s readers are from the States. Still, I’m sure there has been discussion of this, and maybe even workarounds devised.

Again, though, this is all speculation. I’d like to talk to hime about it, maybe, but a lot of this could be “in confidence”.

By: WaterDragon

WaterDragon — Tue, 13 May 2008 02:15:45 +0000

Given timblair.net site visitor numbers, has he negotiated any form of payment for possible increase in Tele ad clicks originating from his new blog page?

By: jason

jason — Tue, 13 May 2008 01:41:30 +0000

Oh noes! What was the topic??

By: Kim

Kim — Mon, 12 May 2008 09:19:39 +0000

Got that, Jason!

Actually one thing that would be interesting to look into is the failure (or at least the unexplained cessation) of Tim’s blog experiment where he got a number of bloggers (including me) to have a cross-blog conversation about a particular issue. It seemed to work well for a while, but then just stopped. I think I broke it by suggesting a topic that was too controversial.