Today, I received the latest eMarketer Daily which had an article, Ad Pricing Down Across the Board. It made me think of a blog post that the Blogster wrote last week, Adgitize: One Step Forward / Two Steps Back. The Blogster was talking about the recent sharp increase in the cost of ads at Adgitize and pondered whether or not to continue advertising there. He presented several different scenarios about what the change could mean for advertising revenue and traffic.

While the world of large corporate advertising that eMarketer tracks seems galaxies apart from the petty in fights of small blog advertising, I believe that systems like Adgitize, EntreCard and CMF Forums provide an interesting test bed to explore the innovations in advertising.

In terms of Adgitize, Corneyman weighed in with his own hypothesized scenarios. I haven’t really thought that closely about the scenarios other than to say that I expect that I will probably continue to make money off of Adgitize advertisements.

So, I thought I would take a look at the traffic numbers on my site. Comparing the first two weeks of September with the first two weeks of October, I found that my traffic from EntreCard advertisements was down 16%. That is pretty close to the 15% paid advertisements and wasn’t too surprising. However, my traffic from Adgitize was down 8% and my traffic from BlogExplosion was down 12%.

What was even more surprising was that people visiting my site from the category browser on EntreCard was up 43%. Perhaps people are browsing more now that advertising is less effective on EntreCard. Traffic from people returning drops from their Inbox stayed about the same. It seems like EntreCard is moving from being an advertising platform to be more of a traffic exchange. While traffic exchanges might be useful for small blogs, they are generally frowned upon as bringing much lower quality traffic and inflating traffic numbers.

Another thing to note is that Ken Brown from Adgitize stopped by and added his comments on the blog post. All of the comments were friendly and Ken’s comments provided a stark contrast the discussions around EntreCard’s strategies.

His analysis concurred with Corneyman’s as well as with my own thinking about the price increase. However, I’m not sure that price inelasticity is completely figured in and that the original post danced around this idea without explicitly naming it. Will the price increase drive away so many people that the total revenues decrease? We will have to wait and see. Yet, anyway you look at it, if you are a regular blogger advertising on Adgitize continues to be a way of getting traffic and earning money at the same time, and at least for me, with active advertising on both Adgitize and EntreCard, I’m getting 60% more traffic from Adgitize than I do from EntreCard.