Marketing Magazine (Australia) & Julian Cole of The Population, have put together a list of Australia's Top 100 Marketing Blogs using the same style methodology as the AdAge Power 150.

In the August print edition of Marketing Magazine we we're number 2. However on Julian's website, we're now number 1, outranking industry stalwarts such as B&T magazine (#41) and Campaign Brief (#21).

A great result for us, so thank you to all our readers, contributors, commenters, loiterers and our sponsor Eyeblaster.

I'm happy to announce that Eyeblaster has come on board as the official sponsor of Bannerblog. As we've mentioned before this site takes a considerable amount of time to maintain and having Eyeblaster support us financially and also creatively is a great help to us.

The easiest part for me is that I use Eyeblaster almost daily at Soap. So I know the product inside out.

I'll also be helping Eyeblaster with their own banner creative showcase called the "Creative Zone." I'll also be stealing a few ideas off the site too as it's built much better than this site. (Don't view source)

You'll see the site change slightly with a few additions but these will all be for the better and the site will remain free to use for a long while to come.

Apologies for being a week late in posting this but here is the link to my presentation I recently gave at the EB uni in Sydney.

The feature on "sexy banners" I posted back in early January was the #1 reason Bannerblog had over 150,000 visitors last month. We also did over 800,000 page views. This woudl have been more if my previous server didn't collapse under the weight of the traffic.

That said traffic to the site has been up with a steady stream of comments too. Submissions are way up with over 10 a week coming in.

Here's a graph of the traffic since tracking it on Google Analytics.

We were slipping there for a few months.

I found out about the AdAge Power150 which ranks the top marketing blogs worldwide (English language though) in January and annoyed that Bannerblog wasn't listed. After a quick email we are now on the list but at a dismal rank of 165. Which I'm told is down 107 from the day before? Our stocks going terrible too :)
Update: Ok this list automatically updates and we're now ranked a respectable 60. I now have another stat to check everyday.

The top blogs are an interesting mix with Seth Godin's blog taking top spot. Which is what you'd expect from a celebrity with a book publishing career. I have two of his books myself.

While it might look easy, keep this website updated and functioning take quite a bit of work each week. To help keep the wheels turning we need the support of sponsors. I'm happy to say that Adobe has come on board for February as sponsor so a big thanks to Adobe for helping keep updated regular.

Britney Spears locked herself in out server room and started causing havoc. So the site was down for 12 hrs today. We apologize for the inconvenience.

You'll need to clear your cache and reload if it's looking a little funny still. We have moved it over to a new (Britney Proof) host. Those in Australia will notice a significant speed increase in page loads.

We reached another milestone and forgot to celebrate. We posted out 900th banner and are well onto our way to 1,000. Which agency will win their place in the history books as the agency behind the 1,000 banner :)

There has been one commenter who has been a negative force on Bannerblog for quite a while. His/her alias is MC. With no more than 32 comments each negative and harsh with a rare dash of actual constructive criticism.

Click here to read the full article and find the identity of MC.

What's this hairy 800 all about?

We've reached our latest milestone of 800 banners! And we've achieved it in just 63 days (not including weekends) thanks to some frantic posting of Cannes work from the team. That's an average of 1.5 banners a day - no other site gives you that!

A beast this big needs feeding, so please keep submitting work. And if you're submitting other interactive work for consideration in the news section, please remember to include a URL and/or screenshot to the work and a very brief summary/overview.

PS. Hope you enjoyed our photoshop effort on the 800 :)

If you have been hot linking our banner files you'll realize now it no longer works.

While I don't mind it being done when there is a link back to our site almost all the other sites never did this. It's slowing down our server and in the last 2 months costing several hundred dollars in excess bandwidth.

The only known image of the Bannerblog team, in a rare sitting together to discuss the addition of a new member, and the approval of a new typewriter ribbon

While the Bancroft Family are busy protecting the editorial independence of the Wall Street Journal from Rupert Murdoch, we at the Bannerblog Journal live a much easier life. Over a glass of 1984 Penfolds Grange at Tetsuya's (we don't have a NoBu downunder yet) we decided life would be so much easier if we had another editor, and with that we charged our glasses , put out a memo, then sat back and smoked a few cubans.

The past few months traffic has been growing at a steady pace, with submissions filling our inbox on an almost on a daily basis. To reflect this growth in traffic, particularly in the US market which accounts for 20.45% of our audience, we're please to announce new members of the Bannerblog team, Kate Daggett-Cohen from Agency.com New York and Paul Collins from Akestam.Holst in Sweden who will help improve our coverage from Europe.

We're still in dire need of an Asia based editor that can help bring that region into the spotlight by posting banners at least once or twice a week. Ashley is doing his bit by dating his own 'Wendy Deng' to get us some influence in Asia, but realistically we don't expect that maneuver to pay off until after the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Benefits?
You get to pimp your own agencies campaigns occassionally, which will no doubt score you some brownie points with your VP/MD/CEO/ECD. And in the unlikely event of a News Corp takeover, you'll be Web 2.0's latest hot property.

For all you Bannerblog fanboi's, we've formed a BannerBlog appreciation group on Facebook.
You know you want to join it... ;)

Don't worry, we won't be appearing in Second Life anytime soon - or indeed ever.

We've introduced an added field to the banner comment forms in an effort to combat comment spam. For those that don't run a blog of their own we receive 120 spam comments for each real comment. And deleting these is a pain.

So all you need to do extra is type in the number seen in the image above the "post" button.

I apologise for the lack of updates to the blog as I was on annual leave without my laptop for the month of May. New baners will be posted tomorrow.

Note: The non holidaying editors are on Detention :)

With 700 under our belt the Bannerblog army marches forward on to the next milestone... 1,000 banners. A big thanks to all the support from our readers and agencies and our sponsor Tangozebra.

It's about this time I realised I'm a nerd. That I was excited (and waiting for) 1337 comments on the blog.

We quickly posted another banner to put us up to 667 banners as it's bad luck for blogs to sit on 666 posts for too long.

OK, I understand that positive comments on your agency's banners make you feel good. And the opposite can be said for negative comments, and we get both kinds here at Bannerblog. Some a little harsh, most are to the point and constructive criticism.

What isn't helping anyone is agencies posting positive comments, wait let me rephrase that, over the top positive comments on their own banners. The agencies responsible don't even bother to comment on other banners, just their own.

So here's my tips for how to make your fake comments seem more real.

1: Go down to the local internet cafe and post. Don't do it from your agencies network, the same network you submit the work from
2: Try to spread the comments out a little. 8 in as many hours is suspicious.
3: Tone the language down. You didn't save the world, you made an animated advert. Hazahh!
4: Ask your IT guy to change the name of your server to something less specific. web.agencyname.ext is a smoking gun. Try web.ISP.ext that leave some doubt.

Or for all our sakes
5: Send the link to friends and ask them to comment honestly on the banner.

NOTE: If you are worried about negative comments on a campaign you can request to have them turned off when you submit the ad. I'd rather see an add up there, sans the ability to comment, rather than never see it.

So in conslusion I feel bad to have to make a point about this but it's getting a little silly. The comments were so OTT they are comical. I do support agencies commenting on their own banners to respond to feedback or give more information but always identifying themselves in the process.

Bannerblog is happy to announce that Tangozebra will sponsor the site for 2007.

This support is essential in maintaining the site and Tangozebra, as Europe's leading digital marketing technology provider, will ensure we are always kept stocked with fresh creative.

The transition over will take place in the next few weeks with Martin Pavey from TZ joining the editorial team.

Note: Above message to be read loudly in a strong English accent.

600 little hard working advertisments whose sole purpose is to either win awards or sell people things they dont need. And on the odd occasion both!

We're on our way to the 1,000 banner mark. When we hit that ad people around the world will be saying "Where were you when they posted the 1,000th banner?"

If you have submitted something lately and received no reply it's either a really crap banner (you know who you are) or we've been busy getitng through backlog and will get to yours soon.

Bannerblog will be takling a brweak from Dec 22 - Jan 3. There will still be some updates (to get through the backlog of entries we have received) but don't expect regular updates.

We hope you all have a great holiday season and what ever you are celebrating, make sure you shoot a video of it and pop it on Youtube.

No use getting totally drunk and throwing up on a slippery slide if there's no one there to video tape it.

I'll be posting all the agency Xmas ecards in the enxt few days.

We've reached a milestone today with our 1000th comment being posted on Bannerblog. Admittedly it was 1 of 4 comments posted by the same person, for a banner I assume they had a part in but it doesn't matter.. we broke 1000!!

In reality we've actually had over 9,000 comments posted but the other 8,000 are spam.

I'm happy that the majority of people who post comments do not post anonymously, and the majority is not overly negative. We do have the odd commenter who likes to stir the pot "read: posting that everything is shit" but this just adds to the fun. At least we have a friendlier community than the one on the Campaign Brief blog

It's still work in progress but the first 5 jobs have been posted onthe Jobs Board.

it's a nice mix of creative an executive roles with the Ogilvy position a nice gig for who gets it.

We'll honour our pledge to post the first 20 positions for free (only 4 spots left) so get in quick and post your jobs now. All the info can be found here.

We'll be integreating the jobs board into the left nav, newsletter and main site over the next few days.

We'll be launching a new Jobs Board next week which is explained here.

We'll be posting the first 20 for FREE, so just mention this offer in your email :)

Out of interest I went through the database and tallied what the breakdown of the countries is for all the banners posted on this site. The figures are not surprising. Note: this site started out as an Australia only site in the first 3-4 months so the Aussies had a major head start. Also with 100+ banners with the agency set as "Unknown" this could even up the stakes considerably.

With submissions increasing every week I see the Aussie's being out numbered in the next 3 months.

NOTE: I'm a dunce at Excel and that's why the graph is in reverse. Aus should be on top but I coudln't get it to go up there.

We are happy to announce we have received the go ahead from Eyeblaster to sponsor the site for the next 3 months. (Insert sound of party popper)

This is great news for all those people who like the site. There should be minimal changes to the site and it's great to see a company like Eyeblaster see the worth in the resource we have worked so hard to maintain the last year.

It not only means we now have a little bit of money to help maintain the site it also means we have the capital to continue to enhance it.

Also we'll be donating 25% of all sponsorship money to Oxfam Australia. We reserve the right to change the charity during the next round of sponsorship.

We'd added a couple of requested features to the site this weekend.

Search: You can now search the archives! You'll notice the little search box in the top left.

News Archives: The news section now has a proper archive. You can check it out here.

If you have any other suggestions on how to make the site better please email us.

For those interested. (and who doesn't love graphs) We have been tracking the stats on the RSS feed since we started the site. Through the great service provided by Feedburner.

Here is a graph of the readers since we began this site just over a year ago.

You can see the dips every weekend as our readers get their weekend away from the screen. The RSS is provided only for the main part if the site and not the news. Which so far hasn't attracted much traffic, it seems people just want their banner fix and get their industry news from other sources.

You can now comment on news posts (for those wanting to have a winge) and all news items are fully archived.

We also welcome two new editors to the ranks. Matt Cumming from M&C Saatchi in Australia and Eric Powell (our most vocal commentor) from Avenue A/Razorfish in the USA.

This will ensure a steady flow of new banners being posted.

Life begins at 400!

We've reached another milestone posting our 400th banner. Cha-chow!

Why not celebrate by going through the 106 unknown agency banners and spilling the beans on which agencies are responsible.

Bannerblog has reached a milestone breaking 60,000 unique visitors within a month. Just shy of our 1 year birthday. While I don't want to drop pants and compare sizes, this pretty impressive for such a niche blog.

There has never been a better time to submit your work to us and gain exposure to the global advertising industry.

A big welcome to Scott Ex Rogers from Euro RSCG 4D in London (why stop at 4?) and Dirk Eschenbacher from Oglvy Shanghai, who join the editorial team for Bannerblog.

We're still looking people to represent South America, Asia and Eastern Europe.
If you're interested contact us. No tire kickers please.

Aside from Campaign Brief and B&T, there is not much in the way of Australian based ad industry blogs. Thank god for sites like Ad-rag. Fairfax also had a dabble for its Cannes coverage last year which was commendable, however I thought I'd highlight B&Ts latest effort, and that is to use Flickr, the photo sharing site from Yahoo for all its Paparazzi shots of local industry events.

And lets face it, we all love getting our mugs in lights, it ranks second after winning an award ;) We look forward to the coverage from Cannes 2006.

Thanks Hamish for pointing out that Bannerblog is mentioned in the March issue of Creative Review.

Funny how not one Australian magazine/website has shown any interest in Bannerblog even after we sent them the required press release. I've checked out pits and we don't stink, so what's the story?

We won our category for Best Interactive blog in the Ad-rag Battle of the Ad blogs. Thanks to all that voted.

As with all advertising competitions cheating was rife. Luckily we had enough friends to see us though and didn't have to run around all the internet cafes. The graphs below show the before and after multiple votes were removed.

Best Online/Interactive Blogs

after:

Looks like Netzkobold voted for himself 61 times! Very subtle. But everyone else in our category played a fair game.

See the full comp results here.

We've now posted over 200 banners. It'd be 500 by now if we had more support from agencies. (hint hint)

We're looking at 2006 as being "Year of the Banner".

Chuck Norris is also in talks about becoming an offical spokesman for the the site.

BannerBlog wants you! {Insert picture of a guy in stars and stripes pointing the finger} as an editor!

We are looking for another 3-4 people to become regular contributors to the main blog.

No pay, no impressive titles and there is no corner office with a pinball machine but you will get a bannerblog email and some Subway stamps.

Please send a brief email to Submit [at] bannerblog.com.au explaining why you want to be an editor.

Hamish McDougall joins us from Glue London as a permanent editor. We are still sorting out other editors applications now so don't worry if we haven't replied yet.

We still haven't received any applications from USA based creatives? Do us Australians smell or something?

Everyone now has the option to add their 2c to any banner we post up now.

Comments are being moderated to stop potential spam, not to censor any negative feedback.

As our professional and personal lives (read: girlfriends) demended more attention the last few weeks we haven't been able to get the comments functionality added to the Banner Blog site yet. It is however in the pipeline and will be completed in the next 2 weeks.

Just remember that whenever you say "2 weeks" to do it in the same voice as Arnie when dressed up as the large woman in Total recall. "Twwwwoooooo Weeeeeeeekssss!" as It's sure to get a laugh out of any Sci-Fi/Arnie fans near by.