BlogAds: Best Click-through Last Hour

BlogAds, a service that allows advertisers to build their own classified-like ads on participating small web sites (mostly weblogs), has introduced a new feature that shows which ads are performing best on a click-through basis, updated hourly. CEO Henry Copeland said he was not aware of any other ad network exposing their best-performing ads like this (and neither am I) and it served the purpose of educating advertisers using the system as to what kinds of ads are likely to stimulate clicks (as well as to generate himself some PR, he shrewdly notes, as an ex-journalist).

He speculated that ads that have a shorter run on a site would get a better click-through, as he assumes most blog readers return frequently to the same site and therefore click-through would decline. I'm not so sure that blog readership is indeed that loyal, that because of blogs' appeal in Google and frequently linking among blogs, I suspect much blog traffic may come from first-time visitors, in which case click-throughs wouldn't drop off so rapidly. Of course, that just raises the point that there is really little objectively known about blog reader behavior (something I've been bugging comScore to let me help them research), as well as the perpetual question: what exactly is a "blog," anyway? What if a blogger fell in the forest and nobody linked to him, would anybody care?