Memetracker Techmeme.com (formerly tech.memeorandum), the most popular web destination for technology news and blog opinions, are giving some prominent space on their website for putting sponsored links. But unlike the standard banners or the text ads, Gabe Rivera [the brain behind Techmeme] has adopted a unique style of advertising.
The sponsors will be showcasing their blog RSS feeds instead of the regular text links. Techmeme robots will poll the advertiser's feed every few minutes and display a link to the latest blog post. So there's an indirect incentive to write better content with catchy or magnetic headlines since they the post headlines will ultimately display as ads on Techmeme.
Never seen such an innovate concept anywhere on the web - you buy a static space on some website for a fixed monthly fee but your advertisements change dynamically tied to the content of own blog posts.
Techmeme receives some 15k unique visitors daily and they are charging anywhere between $4.5k to $3k for a month's slot. The CPM will work out to be around $5-$8 which is actually on the lower side considering the fan following and massive popularity of Technorati. Unfortunately the sponsored space for the first month is already blocked now.
I won't be very surprised much if John Battelle invites Gabe to join the elite Federated Media which also includes popurls.com
Techmeme Sponsorship Model | Cartoon by Hugh
Update: Dave has a slightly different take on Techmeme's advertising model - "I've often wanted to buy a spot on Techmeme, when I have something to announce, and don't want to wait for other people to point to it. I'd rather just pay a bit of money and get the idea displayed in the right margin. Not sure if it makes sense to buy a whole month."