Ordinary Gweilo

Giles (see below) has two advertisements from Google below his post – one advertising BBC sport’s coverage of Arsenal and the other for cheap calling cards. I have read about advertising on blogs, but I think this is the first example I have seen. It’s hardly intrusive (the ads only appear if you click on the extended entry, not on the main page) but is it effective?

I was thinking about the demographics of blogging, and I reckon advertisers should be going for the bloggers themselves, rather than their readers. At this rate, I reckon we can do a lot better than the South China Morning Post (which is currently claiming that 50% of its readers who earn more than HK$25,000 a month have platinum credit cards, or something else equally meaningless).

Think about it: Conrad is a rich lawyer who can afford to jet off for short breaks to tropical islands, but I can neither confirm nor deny that Fumier is another rich lawyer (though he has admitted to driving a Mercedes), Ron owns a string of factories in China, the other Giles has a place at The Peak (with a carport, so I’m guessing it’s a house) and is buying an apartment in Kennedy Town for investment. Shaky just bought a Plasma TV, and Phil is a renowned actor on Hong Kong TV.

Simon buys cheap Chinese DVD players and then takes the MTR to Ngau Tau Kok to get them repaired, so I guess we can count him out, and I don’t suppose freelance web designers earn all that much these days. But not bad, overall, I reckon. Book your advertising space now.

On second thoughts, of course, who reads blogs most avidly? Yes, other bloggers. So let’s look forward to adverts for something a bit more aspirational than BBC Sport and a stupid calling card!