Millions of consumers read blogs, including your target audience. Make the most of this growing marketing opportunity with the right niche ad network.

If there's one buzzword that has spread like wildfire through the entire media business in the last five years, it is blogs.

Universal McCann's global "Power to the People" Social Media Tracker study says that "blogs are a mainstream media worldwide and as a collective rival any traditional media," with 73 percent of respondents saying they have read a blog.

The majority of the 184 million blogs worldwide are of the personal nature, according to Universal McCann's study, and a recent eMarketer report states that there are 25 million bloggers in the U.S. alone.

The eMarketer study says that 67 percent of the U.S. online population -- 104 million people -- reads blogs, showing that blogging has become a truly mass media. The number of blog readers will continue to grow to 145 million by 2012.

The growth in readership reflects the consumer's desire to participate with information, not just consume it. Younger consumers especially seek edgier and more personal sources of content than what is offered by the formal approach of mass media.

While blog readership has exploded, advertising investment represented only 1.34 percent of online spending in 2007, and eMarketer estimates it will grow to 1.46 percent by 2012.  According to that estimate, U.S. blog advertising will increase from $283 million in 2007 to $746 million in 2012.

Today, corporate marketers are asking "do we need a corporate blog?" and "how do we participate in the conversation?" Look at any major media brand's website, and you will almost always find featured blogs as a way to update the brand's online persona.

As marketers become increasingly interested in participating in the conversation of the blogosphere and proactively focusing their customer service efforts on what is being said about the brand online, a number of blog advertising networks have emerged. These networks offer marketers scale and control in advertising on blogs and social media sites, and have succeeded by quickly growing revenues in recent years.

The following is an overview of major blog networks including BlogAds, Gawker Media, Technorati, Federated Media, Google, Forbes' Business Blog Network and Izea, owner of two blog advertising services: SocialSpark and Pay Per Post.

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