Why is blog advertising still difficult in 2008?

I’ve been doing a lot of research in the blog advertising space since launching The Inquisitr back in May. Unlike when I started blogging, there is lots of choice, but very little that pays well.

When I say pays well, I mean anything north of $1 CPM, although preferably higher still. People I speak to running Adsense rarely hit the $1 eCPM rate (unless its a hardcore, targeted niche blog in a high paying vertical) and other companies I’ve tried pay terribly low rates. One recent company I ran on the site delivered 5c for 2 weeks worth of ads. Other companies offer spammy ads and deliver 20-30c CPM, better than nothing, but completely unsustainable as a business proposition.

Surely, for mid-tier blogs at least (anything say above 30,000 page views a month through to 200-300,000 a month, too low for Federated Media) there must be a company or solution that offers better rates for advertising.

I get that scale is always an issue. b5media, a company I co-founded started with an email I sent out to some people with a proposal to collectively sell advertising (the idea being that collectively we had scale to sell), that warped into a blog network in itself. Is there scope today perhaps for mid-tier blogs who aren’t big enough for Federated Media to collectively get together to sell advertising, the combined forces of those blogs offering scale to be attractive to larger advertisers who prefer big ad buys?

Perhaps you’re a company with a solution to this equation? If you think you can help, please feel free to drop me an email and I’ll happily take a look and write about your company. If you are interested in advertising on The Inquisitr, you can find the details here.