Techmeme tries out new sponsorship model

Posted by Tom Foremski - September 25, 2006

Gabe Rivera's Techmeme is experimenting with an interesting approach to sponsorship by selling space on its front page to three other companies.

How it works: A sponsor's blog occupies a permanent place in the "Techmeme Sponsor Post" area of the site for the duration of the sponsorship. The technology is simple: a sponsor's blog feed is polled every few minutes, the latest post of which appears in its assigned slot (first, second, or third) along with a logo image that links to the sponsor's site. See also this post for more on this sponsorship model.

Link to Sponsor Techmeme

I see a few wrinkles in this approach:

-There is no editorial control over what the posts say.

-The sponsors' blogs will be skewed towards the Techmeme audience and thus they will not be representative of their daily output. This could put off regular readers of those blogs.

-Readers of Techmeme come to see what the in-crowd (the select group of blogs that Techmeme polls) is talking about. They have little interest in single blog posts from sponsors who are talking to their communities.

-The sponsors are trying to sell products and services. Blog posts generally are not selling products and services.

-Blog posts in the "sponsor" area are taken out of their context, and placed on a page that puts them out of context with surrounding content.

I would tweak this model a bit.

I would offer up the three positions as window onto the Techmeme community and let the sponsors put whatever marketing message they want (with editorial yank control from Techmeme if it should be needed).

Techmeme could poll every few minutes to see if the marketing message has changed at all.

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