As expected, new services are taking blog monetization to new levels. Think back two years ago, the choices for making money from a blog consisted of Adsense, private sponsors and affiliate links. Now, as 2007 ends, bloggers have various options, from paid posts to text link advertisements. But, a new service, PredictAd.com has come up with a unique way of targeting a blog’s audience: The Search feature.

What Does PredictAd Do?

Think of a blog as a piece of real estate. Some areas are more profitable because of location and ease of access. Yet, no one has thought of taking advantage of a blog’s search feature. Prime real estate, usually at the top of a blog, sitting there waiting to be utilized. This is where PredictAd comes into play. By placing non-intrusive advertisements as a user is typing a search query, not only will this method increase a blog’s retention rates, (by auto-completing the search field and providing more relevant results based on reader’s searching habits), but heightens reader interaction. Below is an example:

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As the example shows, the new search feature provides readers with a list of choices available, relevant to the blog’s content. The text link at the bottom of the search results is the advertisement itself. As the number of users searching the blog increases, PredictAd will learn the search patterns and gives statistics of what visitors are searching for in order to give advertisers and the blog owner the tools necessary to provide results geared to a particular blog’s audience.

Will PredictAd Work For You?

This remains to be seen. While researching the site and attempting to install the 2 small pieces of javascript needed to run PredictAd on my own blog, the code would not work. This could be caused by any number of reasons, a WordPress conflict, or a conflict with another code on my blog. The one aspect I highly recommend to other sites, PredictAd assigns users who sign up, which by the way is free, a mentor of sorts, whom you can contact with questions.

For larger, niche blogs, I see the service working well. People go to these blogs in search of specific topics and are more likely to use the search function. As for smaller, non-niche blogs, the service may work, depending on the audience and if the search function is used. I know, myself, I have yet to use search on any blog I read - niche, or non-niche. I usually browse the archives, or look at the most popular/related posts. Using the analytics tool PredictAd provides alone could assist me in finding out if readers use the search feature and, if they do, what types of topics are they searching.

Keep in mind PredictAd is still in Beta so expect bugs here and there - which is why I’m not too worried about the code not working on my blog. Try the demo, register, install the code and see if it works for you. Help is an email away and I’m curious to see if the service works as far as monetizing a different way for anyone willing to try it out.

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