The Wardman Wire

In response to Mr Eugenides call for a counterpoint to the Season of Goodwill, I am starting a “Misanthropic Blogs Award Meme”. These are the rules:

1. Award Several “Misanthrope Awards” to politicians and bloggers. The number is up to you. You can steal my categories or invent your own.
2. Tag all the bloggers you have made awards to, and several more of your own choosing.
3. If you haven’t done it already, link back to Bloggerheads: The Alisher Usmanov Affair blog at http://b-heads.blogspot.com/ to help keep it in the news. For those who are interested, we (see the sidebar of that blog) are looking at extra things to do to keep the issue live in the New Year.

Here we go with mine. I’m not limiting myself to this year, as I only started blogging in March 2007.

This is not in keeping with the season, but consider it to be the spiciness on the Christmas Pudding.

Note that these are personal awards from Matt Wardman, NOT from anybody else who writes on this blog. If you’re planning to throw any brickbats around, make sure they are aimed at me not at any of the other WW columnists.

And a tastelessness warning: this post includes John Prescott at the end.

Without further ado I tag Recess Monkey, Miranda Grell, Mike Smithson, Guido, Neil Clark, and Donal Blaney.

Vladimir (The Impaler by Proxy) Putin, John (yes it was tempting to put something in here but there are limits) Prescott and the Hampstead and Kilburn Conservatives get off lightly as I do not think they have blogs.

And as my extras - I’ll let slip the dogs of war and tag Hamish the Greek since this post is his fault, the Devil who doesn’t wear Prada, Chris Paul (who will probably have something say on the Miranda front), Septicisle, Unity and Ordovicius, all of whom do a good line in misanthropy when the mood takes them.

Regular readers will know that I removed Text Link Ads from the site.

I’ve also been experimenting with Auction Ads for a time on the Wardman Wire.

This ad network works by displaying details of Ebay Auctions on a website, and pays a commission when someone clicking through from that site wins an auction and pays the money.

My gut feeling was that Auction Ads would work for product and review based blogs, rather than political blogs, and the experience (on the Wardman Wire at least) has borne that out.

These are the statistics for the time I have been using Auctionads on here:

• Ad impressions displayed: 39218
• Click-throughs: 49
• Income received : zero.

That compares with a monthly income from the blog running at around £30 per month from a combination of Google Adsense and Messagespace. Not a huge amount by any means, but it pays for the domains and the hosting for the website.

There’s a post over at Problogger about strategies to find advertisers for a small blog in a niche topic. It set me thinking how small size and nimbleness can be used as an advantage.

I have some points to add to those that can be used particularly well by smaller blogs. They will work especially well in a niche, and give the little guys a competitive advantage.