Site Traffic Vs Links

Will site traffic metrics become more important than links in blog advertising? That's what Heather Green partially examines at Blogspotting and I would most definitely say yes. Links do show some sense of a blogs popularity but they are pretty far from providing the kind of eyeball accuracy that is needed by advertisers nowadays.

The key here is one of those awful advertising acronyms - ROI or Return On Investment. Advertisers like to predict with as much accuracy as possible, how their ad spend will be converted into extra revenue and quite frankly the best way to do that is by looking at site traffic. Hence the moves by Calacanis of Weblogs AOL (not sure what their calling themselves these days) to corner the market in site traffic data. Of course he claims that collecting and managing this data is for the wider good. Yeah right. It's a great business opportunity and and a great idea to monopolise and control the data from the cream of the blogsophere. Mr Calacanis is a great business man but I wish he would be a little more forthright about this opportunity rather than shroud it in a blanket of public service duty, particularly when you look at the charges he is proposing for collecting and presenting that data to advertisers.