Flog 2.0

When reviewing our list of flogs, we found some not expected surprises – several of the ones we found before no longer exist, e.g., Jeff’s Grant Blog and Jake Cutler, whereas some have turned into parking pages, e.g., Kevin’s Rich, and a couple that we simply can’t understand what happened to them. Did we trip on a cookie trap intended to give those of us who might say bad things a hard time, some bad April Fool’s joke, or was the page hacked for instance? If you are curious about either of these two – Just visit Jeffs Grant (not the link above) or Mike’s Money Matters. Before you do, a little advice. Copy the link location. Open either of them up in not just a new window but close any other windows/tabs of importance. Open up your Windows Task Manager (or equivalent) and get ready to end program. Needless to say, the pages are both not safe for work and highly, highly annoying if not clever in a 1999 sort of way. Here is Jeff’s Grant; both it and Mike’s redirect to the same site. And, again, don’t say we didn’t warn you.

Flogs aren’t for the faint of heart (as clearly evidenced by the above) – be it an advertiser, network or arbitrager. We’ve always had a love-hate relationship with them, and to some any article discussing them is one too many. One thing we’ve always said about flogs, though, is that it wouldn’t take too much for them to become legitimate marketing tools. We’ve seen flogs that have begun to use rather lengthy disclaimers at the end (albeit small and very unlikely read), and today, we came across a flog that put "Advertisement" on top of the content. It’s a good start and gives us hope that the format may find a way to become the online version of the advertorial and not the flash in the pan marketing tactic destined to go down as when performance marketers jumped the shark and pissed off everybody. Another thing that gives us hope are the newest entrants to the flog space. No longer do we have the next arbitrager who copied the last who copied the last, etc. We have some truly legitimate brands getting involved. Look at this ad:

It links to the following

Not all of the new breed of flogs are big brands. Some of them are much bolder and not necessarily good for our industry. Take the following for example:

Which goes to:

Perhaps one of our favorite and most inspiring are these celebrity ones:

Happy April Fool’s. Thanks David 🙂 for the inspiration.