Could Ads On Blogs Be Growing Up?

Steve Rubel theorises on the rise of blog advertising in his post "As Portal Inventory Dwindles, Will Ads on Blogs Rise" . He makes a good point - with portal inventory booked for months ahead surely it's time for some big bucks ad dollars to find their way into the cream of the blogosphere. Certainly, Steve points to some tantalising evidence on TechWeb that "Advertising executives see blogs, podcasts and web-enabled cellular phones as newcomers in the market that are worth watching, but have yet to prove they're worth as major investments, a survey released Tuesday showed."

My heart tells me that blog advertising maybe approaching an important cross roads, going from an unruly teenager if you like, to a fully paid up adult of media society. But my head tells me that the cross roads is being called too early, as is alluded to in the "worth watching, but yet to prove worth" bit of the above statement. Almost in paralell to some of my statements about where "blogging in general currently sits" in my post The Wider Implications of Business Blog Survey my belief is that blog advertising proper has some growing up to do on a number of fronts.

I'm not being a stick in the mud for saying this - it's what I think is an objective assessment, based on recent experiences in the advertising agency environment. However, what I ultimately believe this boils down to is a question of time and acceptance into the mainstream. How long will that take is an interesting question? I think we have already seen tentative toes dipped into the water and that will probably be the form for another six months to year. In terms of when we might see consistent multi million dollar ad inventory commitments I think we're potentially looking at 18 months - 2 years. But who really knows!