During the past couple years, people have inquired about buying ad space here at CMSReport.com.  While someone wanting to place a banner on my site could always use Google's Adwords, most of the inquiries seem to want a more direct approach.  I've always been reluctant to host the ad banners on my own server and, until recently, I wasn't impressed with a lot of the banner ad services available for publishers such as me.  Luckily, things change.

I'm happy to announce that I'll be selling 125x125 banner ads through BuySellAds.com.  BuySellAds.com provides a more direct approach for me to manage these ads by allowing sponsors to purchase the ad space at a flat monthly rate.  No longer will I or the sponsors have to worry about cost per click, cost per conversion, cost per lead, etc.

The 125x125 banner ads will initially be offered at $50 per month.  If this offering is as well received as I think it will, the price will likely go up in a few months.  Feel free to contact me if you have interest in sponsoring CMS Report with a banner space of 468x60 or 300x250.  If there is enough interest, I'll provide the ad space.

Update: On December 11th, Acquia becamse our first sponsor in our new advertising program.  Thank you Acquia!

Today's Wall Street Journal has a great article regarding an employee swap between Procter & Gamble and Google, A New Odd Couple: Google, P&G Swap Workers to Spur Innovation.  The motivation behind the swap was to spur innovation between the two companies.

Google would like to have a bigger slice of P&G's $8.7 billion annual advertisement budget and better understand the needs of traditional consumer-market companies.  Meanwhile P&G still spends most of it's advertisement dollars in traditional media with as little as 2% of its ad budget online does need some help in making the leap online.

What impressed me most in the story was just how much companies such as Google and P&G are in two different worlds.

As the two companies started working together, the gulf between them quickly became apparent. In April, when actress Salma Hayek unveiled an ambitious promotion for P&G's Pampers brand, the Google team was stunned to learn that Pampers hadn't invited any "motherhood" bloggers -- women who run popular Web sites about child-rearing -- to attend the press conference.

"Where are the bloggers?" asked a Google staffer in disbelief, according one person present.

For their part, P&G employees gasped in surprise during a Tide brand meeting when a Google job-swapper apparently didn't realize that Tide's signature orange-colored packaging is a key part of the brand's image.

I'm one of those people that get nervous when I see two opposing cultures trying to connect with each other.  I am much more comfortable to read about such stories in the safe confines of my home office.  I also get a little giddy when I hear of success in the bridging of two enterprise cultures.  I wonder if Google would ever like to swap one of their employees for my federal IT job?  I could use a little bit of innovation know how...

Good news for sites that make a little money by allowing advertising on their pages.  Though, personally I've seen a drop in online ad revenue despite not doing too bad with the number of visitors I'm getting.

Despite an economic turndown, online advertising--and search in particular--is managing to keep its market intact, according to reports on Tuesday by an industry trade group and Wall Street analyst. 

Complete Story

Linux.com is featuring a story by Susan Linton titled "Drupal 6 keeps getting better". The author claims she has been using Drupal since version 3.1 and seems to know Drupal well enough to write a decent article. In short, she does a farily nice job of summarizing the features introduced in Drupal 6. However, she ends the article with a rather strange conclusion.

My primary complaint with Drupal is still not addressed in this release. I believe having advertising capabilities is almost a necessity in any content management solution. Instead, Drupal leaves users to their own skills or to use a contributed module. The lack of native advertising support remains a major drawback.

I rarely have seen such request for an "advertisement feature" in the core of any CMS I've reviewed. Yes, some CMS do have an advertisement feature but in most cases the capabilities of such built-in features are usually limited. Either way, I just can't imagine with the latest drive to strip the less needed modules in Drupal 7 and beyond, that the Drupal developers would go for an ad module in the core.

I'm in the middle of switching the text editor on CMS Report from FCKeditor to TinyMCE. Both are fine WYSIWYG editors, but I have seen some problems lately so this is a good time to try something different. The text editor is available to those who have open a free account here at CMS Report. The CSS in the Drupal theme I'm using isn't quite compatible with the TinyMCE editor so I'll be doing some tweaking in the next week or so.

During the past few months, I've been getting inquiries about how to place an ad on this site. If you are one of those people, I'm sorry if I haven't gotten back to you in a timely manner. I've been a little more focused on just getting the content out there as well as working on some usability issues for visitors here at the site. I plan on looking at some options and in a couple weeks should have a "how to place ads" page up here at CMSReport.com. If someone would like suggest an option, please feel free to leave a comment here or send an e-mail through the contact page.

As always, I'm open to suggestions for improving the site as well as criticism. A lot of people in IT don't like to hear complaints, but I'm not one of those people. Without good quality criticism, it's difficult make necessary improvements.