The blog advertising network operated by Performancing will shut down by the end of January, with lack of funds for investment cited as the cause.
The Performancing Partners program offered bloggers and advertisers the opportunity to reach audiences of highly targeted blogs and generate revenue for the blog publishers. It appears the product never reached its potential.
Chris Garrett, Performancing’s CTO, disclosed the end of the Partners program in a blog post:
I’m sad to tell you that Partners has to close. While I have every faith it could have worked, it wasn’t going to happen fast enough. Without more money invested it wasn’t going to happen at all.
Any ads currently in the system will continue to run until the end of the month at which time the ad code will stop working.
When launched, Partners offered a “new, smart way” for publishers to get paid for doing their blogging. Substantial competition for publishers exists. Google’s AdSense appears on sites throughout the Internet, while John Battelle’s Federated Media has gathered a number of very high-profile blogs to host its advertising.
One commentor on Garrett’s post suggested the Partners program simply wasn’t working as advertised:
This post is timely. I just removed the code from my sidebar on the 21st and took myself off the market. I felt there was no marketplace for me to fit in, and I can’t believe I was the only one…
Another comment came from Performancing’s co-founder and former CEO, Nick Wilson. He left Threadwatch to create Performancing, but his remark seems to suggest a disconnect existed between himself and Garrett when it came to Partners:
That’s a dreadful waste. For want of a few grand…
A few weeks back, there were some options lying around. Not easy ones, but ones that would have allowed partners to continue, can those not be re-explored rather than see this happen?
Ultimately any effort to promote an online ad network has to provide a benefit to its membership. The blogging landscape, aside from the most highly trafficked blogs that can negotiate a deal, may end up being the personal playground for Google and Yahoo publisher advertising products.
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David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business.
