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TechCrunch: Now with more sponsors

In the last few days Michael Arrington has added 2 new sponsors to TechCrunch to make up a total of 6 sponsored ads at the top right. The advertising rate has also been increased from $7,500 to $10,000 for these sponsored ads. The fact that TechCrunch probably has over 4 million page views by now makes these sponsored ads a good buy to anyone trying to brand their company to this early-adopter demographic. This reminds me of the early days of search engine optimization and how companies purchased links on the Internet.com network for $4000 a month just to increase their search engine rankings.

Now the question remains, with all of these page views, attentive readers and willing advertisers, how can TechCrunch improve accountability for its' sponsors?

1. The placement of the ads can be rotated. That way different ads show up in different positions each time a visitor goes to TechCrunch.com. This will make it so that equal weight will be given to all advertisers which is especially important because all advertisers are paying the same monthly rate. Most high traffic websites have implemented this type of rotation for both graphic ads and text link ads.
2. Some type of ad tracking solution that reports to advertisers how many page views and clicks their ads received would be of great benefit, especially to quantify the benefit of the ad. Currently only three of the six advertisers are using some type of visible tracking system to get click through information, but this type of tracking is limited.
3. An option to have a nofollow tag placed on the ads would also be beneficial to sponsors. Most likely, none of the TechCrunch sponsors are trying to gain any search engine ranking benefit from these ads, so they should not risk being penalized by the search engines.
4. With over 70,000 RSS subscribers it would be nice to have the sponsors' ad show up in the RSS feed, simply because many readers do not click through to the actual website, and just read TechCrunch in a RSS reader.

These changes might not be beneficial to the readers of TechCrunch or to Michael Arrington, but they will benefit the advertisers. If advertisers are going to pay that much money for an ad, they should get more for their dollar. Other popular sites that sell advertising offer these options and TechCrunch should consider implementing these options. Ultimately, Michael Arrington is not just responsible for keeping readers happy anymore, he also responsible for keeping his sponsors happy and hopefully working out a balance in between.

Update: Techcrunch just announced their growing list of sponsors.