Feedster 500 as a Media Planning Tool

Evidently, the marketing community is embracing the Feedster 500, looking to it as a tool for media planning, according to MarketingVox.

Feedster's new list of what it calls the 500 top blogs, largely based on the ambient prevalence of links to those sites across the web, spawned several prominent discussions as to how useful blog media may be for advertisers. The list itself was published in part because of encouragement by some bloggers unhappy with the methods used by Technorati to rank its top 100. And the subtleties of these differences underlay the core of the issue of why blog media may or may not prove useful for some advertisers.

Typically, ad agencies like to rank traditional media in terms of popularity, with circulation and ratings providing a surrogate measure for quality and relevance. That instinct is served with the new list, and according to an insightful ClickZ canvassing of the buying industry, some buyers are beginning to cautiously look to the list for this sort of validation.

But marketers using blogs as media fall into one of two very different groups: consumer marketers and business-to-business marketers, and the mechanisms for buying media relevant to one are quite different to those employed to buy the other. Where consumer marketers see a direct correlation between site popularity and its usefulness, b-to-b marketers often find the opposite, as they instead seek highly discrete, specialized audiences. Mixing Boing Boing and Fleshbot with the New England Journal of Medicine and Search Engine Roundtable conflates not just two different types of sites, but also two different types of buying processes.

It is interesting. Hear I am lambasting Feedster for being so subjective in their criteria, and the rest of the online marketing community is building media plans around it.

More interesting is that there seems to be a wide open window for someone like MediaPost or ClickZ to jump in and create a 100% editorial list of top blogs, factoring in popularity as well as editorial quality. Let's see who gets there first.