Yahoo! Sends 100M Visits to Newspapers, How Much Money Is That?
July 30th, 2008
Yahoo! just announced that they’ve sent over 100M visits to the Newspaper Consortium from Yahoo! sites. The Consortium is a partnership of holding companies that contains 770 local newspapers. And apparently they are pretty happy about getting links to their articles throughout Yahoo!
“It’s very exciting when our news makes it to Yahoo.com’s top features,” said Anthony Moor, Deputy Managing Editor, Interactive, The Dallas Morning News, and editor of dallasnews.com. “It’s like a firehose blasting us with up to 800,000 page views in just a couple of hours. We’ve had placements that have accounted for up to 27 percent of the day’s page views, and 65 percent of the day’s unique visitors.”
When I read this article the first question that came to my mind was how much ad revenue Yahoo! created for the Consortium through that traffic, so it’s time for some back of the envelope math!
(Note, I have no inside information or statistics and these are all just estimated guesses).
1. Yahoo! has sent 100 million visits to Consortium websites.
2. Let’s assume an average page views per visit at a conservative 3 pages viewed per visit which gives us an estimated 300 million page views created.
3. Some brief viewing of newspaper sites gives me an average of around 5 ad impressions per page. That gives us a total of 1.5 billion ad impressions created.
4. A portion of those impressions are going to be sold at high CPM rates, while a portion will be sold at lower non-guaranteed rates below $1. How much depends on the individual newspapers and the strength of their salesforces. This is a tough one to estimate, but let’s just say the average nets out to a $2 CPM overall.
Divide 1.5 billion by 1000 to get 1.5 million. Then multiply by $2 to get a total of $3 million dollars that Yahoo! has provided in direct ad revenue.
Conclusion
Obviously if you change any of those numbers they’re so large the results change dramatically, but I feel like this is at least a decent estimate of direct revenue. That of course doesn’t tell the whole story as many users may become return visitors, bookmark sites, visit sponsored sections, or provide revenue to the newspaper in other ways.
“More than the bursts and spikes, sharing our content with Yahoo! brings a steady growth in traffic to our site, which provides us with more inventory to sell to our advertisers,” said Jon Beck, Vice President, Online Advertising and Business Development, The New York Daily News. “Our overall partnership with Yahoo! has been game-changing, and has brought new energy to our content and business.”
That’s exciting stuff to hear for Yahoo!. I think it’s also one advantage they have over Google and others in advertising relationship is the ability to create partnerships that go beyond just direct monetization to provide value to publishers in many ways. It’s going to be interesting to watch as Yahoo! gets more aggressive in opening up their own sites to traffic partnerships and advertising deals.
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Entry Filed under: Advertising, Yahoo
5 Comments Add your own
1. Michael | July 31st, 2008 at 8:00 am
Boy, Google News should try to send traffic to newspapers. Wait, they always have. Hmmm
2. Steve | August 1st, 2008 at 6:22 am
Your maths are WAY out. Amateur.
– 3 page views per visit? Most users read what they want and hit the back button. Averages are 1.1-ish. Max.
– 5 ads per page? Are you mad? Try 2 as an average. The other slots, if they exist, are full of house ads or cpc
– $2cpm is your only accurate guess.
– and you forgot sell-thru rates, probably at around 50% max.
Honestly, this is why some blog pundits deserve to go under. You make a big shouty headline, but it’s based on garbage.
3. Pat McCarthy | August 1st, 2008 at 10:27 pm
Michael,
Fair point on Google also sending traffic from Google News, but Yahoo has been doing that for a while as well. This is a bit different as Yahoo is showing links in many places in better context throughout many Yahoo properties. If you recall, the newspapers haven’t always been happy about what Google has been doing with Google News.
4. Pat McCarthy | August 1st, 2008 at 10:34 pm
Steve,
In regards to my “maths” being way out, do you have data that shows you 1.1 visits is the average?
While a large percentage of users will just view one story and leave, many will view other stories at the site raising that average. Additionally, since I didn’t take into account the value that some visitors will actually just return to a newspaper site later without going through Yahoo, there are additional page views created due to the initial link that aren’t being considered. That leads me to believe counting 3 page views per visit is not that far off.
I’m not mad actually, most pages I viewed had 5 or more ads. CPC ads generate money in case you weren’t aware, and house ads technically have value as well. At Yahoo we actually know to a pretty exact amount what CPM our house ads generate by getting users to sign up for services or get them to visit other content that is monetized well. In many cases house ads will be shown over other paid ads because the CPM is higher.
I was taking sell-through into account. While 50% sell through is for guaranteed ad campaigns, the other 50% should be monetized as non-guaranteed inventory through ad networks, CPC ads, house ads, etc. I was actually taking this into account with my $2 average CPM, because most guaranteed campaigns they sell should be at a much higher rate than $2.
Regardless, the exact number isn’t really the point as much as it’s a lot of a traffic and money, and it’ll be interesting to see how Yahoo leverages these relationships in the future.
5. Dotless Domain Technology&hellip | September 19th, 2008 at 3:04 pm
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