• About
  • Contact
ConversionRater A discussion of online advertising, web entrepreneurship, and personal ramblings from Pat McCarthy.

Category Archives: Ad Networks

Discussion of online ad networks.

Publishers Won’t Run Their Own Contextual Networks

February 5, 2007 9:33 pm / 6 Comments / Pat McCarthy

Well, at least not in mass numbers.

FAST Search and Transfer, the people who brought us AllTheWeb.com, are soon to launch a product called AdMomentum that allows publishers to create their own “Adsense-like” contextual network for selling to advertisers directly, instead of sharing their spoils with Google or other contextual ad network providers.

Some are pretty excited about the idea, others like Andy Beal are don’t buy it. First, they really aren’t the first to do this as Quigo’s AdSonar and ContextWeb have been around for a few years now. Second, while the time is probably more ripe today for publishers to be ready to roll their own contextual solution for advertisers, I still don’t think the majority of the publisher world is ready to do such a thing.

There are many things I’ve learned over the past two years working heavily in the online advertising space, and three of them are important in this issue.

1. Publishers don’t want to do deal with advertising.
Publishers for the most part want to focus on publishing their sites. They aren’t experts in advertising, they don’t always like advertising, and they only deal with it because they need to pay the bills and they want to grow the revenue generated from their site. I’m generalizing a bit here, but I think it holds pretty true in general. Even if they are knowledgeable and excited about advertising, they really don’t want to deal with much of the complexity involved. They just want to make as much money as they possibly can with the least amount of hassle.

While I haven’t yet seen the AdMomentum platform, it sounds to me like it will take work on the publisher side, and anytime you’re selling to advertisers directly that’s the case. AdMomentum will have to be extremely easy to use for it to be an easier process than signing up for an ad network, pasting some code, and cashing your check.

2. There is a lot of value in ad networks.
This is partially true based on what I just said about publishers not wanting to deal with hassle. Often ad networks are the ones dealing with the hassle. They optimize the campaigns, they aggregate creatives, they host the data and serve the ads, they eat the bandwidth costs, they find the advertisers, they deal with the advertisers, they bill the advertisers, they collect from the advertisers, they pay the publisher, etc. Publishers often wonder and complain about ad networks taking such a big cut. The reality is that ad networks do a lot of work and provide value. Many people I’ve talked to over the past couple of years have wondered if what we do at Right Media threatens the ad network business since we aim to make online advertising more efficient and many see networks as middlemen. The reality is that the networks provide value, and sometimes when you put the advertisers and publishers directly in contact with each other, things work out worse than if you have a network managing the process and taking their cut in the middle.

3. Very few publishers get direct advertisers.
It’s the dream of many publishers out there to have mobs of advertisers beating down their doors to directly advertiser on their site. The reality is that really only the top 5% of publishers ever sell direct advertising. Generally, in order to sell direct advertising you need to either have a lot of traffic, or be one of the leading sites with a great name in your industry. Maybe this is who the AdMomentum program is made for, but those top publishers are already in bed with a lot of people, and one or more of the contextual networks is often one of them. Ad networks provide advertisers to publishers. Advertisers they’d never get otherwise. Does Google take a nice cut? Sure they do, but they bring the publishers a heck of a lot more advertisers than that publisher would ever get on their own. Plus, a smart publisher will sell everything that they can direct anyway (they probably already are), and then use ad networks to fill the rest.

It’s these three reasons that I don’t think AdMomentum from Fast will have much uptake. Running your own show as a publisher takes work, hassle, and the ad networks bring more value than people usually realize.

Posted in: Ad Networks, Advertising, Publishing

RMX Direct Featured Publisher: Star Media Group

February 2, 2007 3:50 pm / Leave a Comment / Pat McCarthy

logostar104_jd.jpg

We’ve just completed another featured publisher interview at RMX Direct. Read on for more about Star Media Group and how they use RMX Direct to improve their ad monetization on their online radio sites.

Star Media Group Inc. is a conglomerate of online radio stations that span a number of genres. These stations include www.star104.net, www.club977.com, www.977music.com, www.kmgx.com, www.oldiesradionet.com, www.radiostorm.com, www.club977hitz.com, and www.rdl101.com. Jamie Davis is the President of Star Media Group Inc., and he is our new Featured Publisher.

—

Vince Panero (VP): How did you get interested in web publishing originally? What were those early days like for you?

Jamie Davis: We started in internet radio years back and were looking for a way to monetize our listener traffic. Audio ads were still new and not very popular as of yet, so we looked to image and banner advertising on a CPM basis. The first months were rough and low in earnings, but after a few months, everything just sort of took off, and we found ourselves growing our revenue every month. It’s been great ever since.

VP: Can you tell us about your online radio-focused website? Having this focus, are there any particular issues exclusive to your site that you had to overcome to make the advertising model work?

Jamie Davis: Our website (websites actually, we operate 3 sub-portals of stations under our parent corporation) consists of several online-only radio station webcasts, each predominantly windows media based. It is imperative that our sites run banner advertising that is parallel to the type of audience we draw in. It’s been tough at times to accomplish that goal, as some of our advertisers have simply thrown any old ad up there without specifically targeting our demographics. RMX Direct has helped with that by providing targeted ads along with the use of their Media Guard system to prevent unwanted ads from being shown. We’ve also had some problems in the past with getting the most money for our inventory. RMX Direct also solves this problem with the bid-based system they utilize.

VP: Did you get into this with the idea that you would make ad dollars from this site? How did you initially monetize your site? What problems did you encounter utilizing these early methods?

Jamie Davis: Originally, webcasting was simply something I enjoyed as a hobby, and eventually, it became more of a full-time job and I was happy to be able to do what I liked to do. Initially, we didn’t really monetize our site; most of our DJs were just in it for the thrill of internet radio and having an audience listening to their picks. After a while, bandwidth became an issue, and we turned to some sort of advertising revenue. We started out with audio ads, but during our first days, times were tough because audio advertising was still very new to the market, and internet radio was pretty new itself. After a while, we decided banner-based ads were the way to go.

VP: Why did you start using RMX Direct as your ad network management system of choice?

Jamie Davis: RMX Direct allows us to rotate our outside publishing accounts in their system and eliminates the need for us to have to install and utilize our own system, such as phpAds or AdJuggler. These systems, with our amount of web traffic, can heavily tax our web server and cause downtime after a few hours of heavy traffic. We can rotate our current accounts in RMX Direct, while at the same time allowing the RMX networks to compete and outbid for our inventory. It really helps us monetize our traffic on a new level, both by keeping our overhead down, and increasing our overall revenue.

VP: What statistical changes have you seen since you started using it? For example, have your eCPM and revenue increased?

Jamie Davis: Our eCPMs as a whole, across our entire inventory measurement, have increased by at least 20%. Our revenue has also increased along the same lines thanks to this. We’ve noticed that much more of our traffic has been monetized, and less defaults and PSAs have been shown across all our advertising accounts.

VP: What do you like most about RMX Direct? Are there helpful parts of it that other ad management interfaces simply don’t offer? And how does it address the specific needs of being an online radio-focused website?

Jamie Davis: I really enjoy RMX’s overall administrative platform. When I log in to the system, I can not only view revenue for the day, but I can also easily rotate all of my ad engines into the mix and set up a rotation I prefer, based on geo-targeting, eCPM, frequency, etc. It really eliminates a lot of the hassle of having to install and administer my own rotation system. No other ad management interface I’ve seen does this as effectively. It really allows us, as an online radio web portal, to manage our ad placements effectively and easily. Our revenue enjoys the benefits of this.

VP: Do you have any tips or tricks that you think others using the exchange might find useful?

Jamie Davis: There are really no tricks to this, but I do have one tip. Keep your eCPMs for your outside networks updated at least weekly. I update ours on a weekly basis, and it really helps our revenue grow. Don’t just set a general CPM and sit and wait, or everything suffers. Keep everything updated on a consistent basis.

VP: Do you have any final thoughts on this “exchange concept” (network transparency and competition, the utility of having just one login, etc.)?

Jamie Davis: This new ad exchange platform has revolutionized everything in the online advertising world as far as I’m concerned. If we could get all of our networks to join into this system, I don’t think I’d have quite as many problems as I have when it comes to running the technical aspects and financial aspects of our company.

VP: Thanks for being a member of RMX Direct, Jamie.

Posted in: Ad Networks, Advertising, Direct Media Exchange, Publishing

RMX Direct Case Study: CheatCodes.com

January 31, 2007 4:20 pm / 3 Comments / Pat McCarthy

We’ve got our first case study video created for RMX Direct. The lucky case study is Steve Jenkins from CheatCodes.com. Steve was very gracious to allow us to interview him and provide some helpful insights into how he’s used RMX Direct to improve the amount of ad revenue he earns from his site.

Posted in: Ad Networks, Advertising, Direct Media Exchange, Publishing, Right Media

Yahoo Brand Sites Would Be Better As a Tool For YPN Publishers

January 31, 2007 12:40 pm / 4 Comments / Pat McCarthy

Yahoo has announced the implementation of a new set of brand sites that are almost entirely built with the APIs of various Yahoo services like Flickr, Yahoo! Video, Yahoo! Answers, Yahoo! News, del.icio.us, and more.

The first site is a site for the Nintentdo Wii gaming system. Supposedly Yahoo is not doing these in partnership with the brands, but may do so at some point.

I think it’s a great idea that Yahoo! is looking to leverage their services and APIs in ways to create compelling sites and content. But as John Battelle points out, something doesn’t feel quite right about this implementation.

Regardless, I think a better strategy would be to use all of Yahoo’s various content services and make them available to YPN publishers. Make it extremely easy for both technical and non-technical web publishers to pull this same type of content, and in exchange that publisher has to use YPN to monetize the content. Therefore, if I’m a publisher running my own Nintentdo Wii site I can use this same content, and reward Yahoo for providing it by running their ads on it. Sure, they’d need some way to check or verify this, but I think it could be done.

It’s a service that Google could not provide to Adsense users, as they don’t own as much content or as many widely-used services as Yahoo. Why not leverage those strengths into helping win more volume from publishers?

Posted in: Ad Networks, Advertising, Publishing, Random, Yahoo

RMX Direct Has Launched

January 29, 2007 5:46 am / Leave a Comment / Pat McCarthy

The web application I’ve been heading up this year called RMX Direct has now come out of beta and officially launched to the public.

It’s both exciting and a relief. However, it’s just the beginning as the job is far from done to continue to make it better as well as educating and supporting all the web publishers who are using it.

I’ll keep track of the blog posts and articles written about it during today’s launch here:

  • Right Media Launches RMX Direct – DMNews
  • RMX Direct Ad Exchange Launches – IMediaConnection
  • Maximize Your Ad Inventory Earnings with RMX Direct – Web Publishing Blog
  • RMX Direct Out of Beta – 360TechBlog
  • RMX Direct Out of Beta – Digg
  • RMX Direct launches, lets publishers optimize inventory – Yardley.ca
  • RMX Direct Gets Best Ad Revenue For Small Publishers – AdRants
  • RightMedia Launches RMX Direct for Publishers – Cost Per News
  • Right Media Spurs Network Sparring Over Small Site Inventory – ClickZ
  • RMX Direct to Make Publishers $$$ – MikeMcNeeley.com
  • Right Media Launches RMX Direct – OffTheIsland
  • It’s All About the Launch – The Green V
  • RMX Direct Open To Public – Learning Horses
  • RMX Direct Launches – WebMetricsGuru
  • Official Press Release – Right Media
Posted in: Ad Networks, Advertising, Direct Media Exchange, Random, Right Media, Web 2.0

Google Adsense Hates Bloggers and Publishers

January 18, 2007 9:12 am / 6 Comments / Pat McCarthy

The headline may sound a little harsh, but based on their recent Adsense policy updates as noted by Jensense, it’s the conclusion that has to be made.

Previously, Adsense was already anti-competitive because they didn’t allow publishers to run competing contextual ad networks on the same page. Therefore, you couldn’t run Adsense and the Yahoo Publisher Network on the same page at the same time. It should be noted this is a policy that Yahoo also has for the Yahoo Publisher Network, but beyond that no other display ad network or other ad networks that I know of enforce such a policy. This policy forced publishers who wanted to use more than one contextual network on their site to either run the networks on different pages, or use some type of rotating script to make sure that no other contextual network showed at the same time as Google.

Now, they’ve gone a big step further and changed their Competive Ads and Services policy to this:

In order to prevent user confusion, we do not permit Google ads or search boxes to be published on websites that also contain other ads or services formatted to use the same layout and colors as the Google ads or search boxes on that site. Although you may sell ads directly on your site, it is your responsibility to ensure these ads cannot be confused with Google ads.

What this means is that not only can competing contextual networks not be on the same page, they can’t be on the same site altogether if they look anything like Adsense ads. And now it’s not just contextual networks, it’s any ad network at all, or ads that you even sell yourself!

So, Google is really saying this: “You can’t run any ads from anywhere that look like our ads, even if you run them on entirely different sections of your site.”

Can anyone way anti-competitive? Can anyone say arrogant?

How does this help publishers? It doesn’t help them in any way, it only hurts them. It causes publishers to limit the amount of advertising competition that they run on their site which hurts their revenue. It forces them to make all their other advertising use colors or visual looks that might not be optimal. It makes publishers use colors that might not match their site so they don’t incur the mighty wrath of Google.

What’s Google’s excuse for this? As you’ll notice in the policy, it says that it’s to “prevent user confusion”. Okay, so they’re trying to tell us that users are getting confused on which ads are from Google and which ads are from other advertisers? Honestly, what users care? Does anyone think that people are only clicking Adsense ads because they’re from Google? Or they they are clicking YPN ads because they think they are from Google? How many people have you ever talked to that are confused over who the ad provider is on the website they are visiting?

This has nothing to do with preventing user confusion. It has to do with being the market leader and trying to limit competition and lock up advertising inventory. There’s nothing wrong with trying to be a market leader, but Google isn’t doing it by providing more for the publisher, they’re doing it by causing publishers to fear them.

I have removed Adsense ads from this blog as a result of this policy. If Adsense doesn’t like me, why should I like them?

UPDATE:
Numerous top bloggers have commented: John Chow, Website Publisher, Darren Rowse, Business 2.0 Beta, and Eric Lander.

Posted in: Ad Networks, Advertising, Google, Random, Yahoo

Miva Launches a Publisher Contextual Network Combining Ad Units with Inline Ads

January 17, 2007 4:58 pm / Leave a Comment / Pat McCarthy

MediaPost reports that Miva is launching a publisher ad network called Monetization Center that uses traditional contextual ad units alongside content, along with inline ads within actual content along the lines of Vibrant Media’s Intellitxt.

Miva is facing a tough site going up against Google Adsense and YPN, and frankly they don’t have the advertiser base those two giants do to help drive prices up and help have lots of ads in each niche. So how do you compete with them? You innovate with the product hoping to get enough publishers that the advertisers follow.

What is Miva doing to innovate? The first thing is providing the inline ads that look like dotted hyperlinks but show an ad on mouseover. These ads are effective from what I’ve heard on click-through rates, but many users and publishers find them annoying and intrusive. No matter what you think about them though, providing publishers with the option to use them is at least one thing they offer that Adsense and YPN aren’t offering.

How else will they differentiate? According to Mediapost:

Chrysi Philalithes, vice president of marketing and global communication for MIVA, said the company aims to provide more customization and transparency than larger competitors, and to give publishers a larger share of the revenue. She said that publishers’ share of revenue will increase based on the ads’ performance. Publishers will also be able to customize how the ads appear on their pages, Philalithes said. “Fonts, colors–we give a great deal of customization,” she said. “It’s really built there to get the publisher as much control and visibility as possible.”

So, I like the sliding revenue share increases, and I love transparency. I plan to check it out to see what customization they offer because Adsense and YPN already offer colors, but changing fonts could be interesting.

Good luck to Miva, the more competition in the contextual space the better.

Posted in: Ad Networks, Advertising, Random

Friendster Has a $0.04 CPM

January 13, 2007 11:59 pm / 5 Comments / Pat McCarthy

It’s a bit of an estimate, but according to a recent post at Venturebeat, Friendster made $700,000 in revenue in December on 6 billion page views. This equates to making $0.12 per 1000 page views. I checked and they look to average about three ads per page, meaning they’re really making $0.04 per 1000 ad impressions, giving them an effective CPM of $0.04.

Is this good? I’m sure that low of a number shocks some people, probably bloggers and other niche publishers who get really high CPM numbers from targeted advertising, Google Adsense, or Yahoo Publisher Network.

Social networks are a different animal though, as contextual advertising doesn’t work as well when there isn’t a strong context to grab from a page. In the cases of most social networks, display banner-style advertising generates higher rates. But is $0.04 good?

I know the data of some other social networks, and I can say that this isn’t THAT shocking, but I definitely think there is room for improvement. I have some ideas on how I’d improve Friendster’s advertising revenue, but first I’d like to see if any of you out there have any suggestions. Speak up!

Posted in: Ad Networks, Advertising, Publishing, Social Networks, Web Analytics

Adsense Doesn’t Suck For Blogs. I Think? Right?

January 8, 2007 1:24 am / 8 Comments / Pat McCarthy

I love it when the blogosphere gets worked up and makes generalizations from one piece of data. In this case, that data is Guy Kawasaki’s post about his blog’s performance over the year which includes his Adsense statistics.

The discussion coming out of that post has many people saying that Adsense sucks for blogging, and that blogs and Web 2.0 companies hoping to make big money from it are in trouble.

As with most things in life, it isn’t that simple. Luckily I get to work with web publishers all day, and I have access to a lot of statistics where I can see their results from different ad networks. You can’t just come out and say it doesn’t work for blogging. That just isn’t true.

First, it depends on what your goals are. If Guy Kawasaki’s goal was only to make a few thousand dollars in the year, then Adsense didn’t suck for him. If his goal was to make 50 thousand, then yes it did. The question would then be if his goal was realistic. Adsense, and any advertising for that matter, depends largely on numerous factors that affect how much money you can make from it.

1. Audience

The quality and demographics of your audience can really affect the amount of money you earn. Is your audience valuable to advertisers? Do they react to ads? Do they click? Do they convert? Guy’s audience really is valuable for who they are, but Adsense is only based on the click, and his audience is probably too wise to click much.

2. Site Topics
Ads for products and specific industries pay much more than other products and industries. In Guy’s case, he blogs about numerous subjects and I’m not sure any of them really result in high-paying topics. It’s also harder to get targeted ad buys when your site is somewhat general. Sites that are focused and on a specific topic are often more attractive to advertisers.

3. Traffic Level
I hate generalizations, but most blogs don’t generate enough ad impressions and clicks to make a lot of money from Adsense or other ad networks. If your goals are modest, this is fine. If your goal is to get rich, you’re going to need a lot of traffic, and the blog medium just doesn’t seem built for massive traffic generation. Even the blogs at the top of the Technorati rankings aren’t really getting much traffic compared to a lot of standard web sites out there. I work with sites every day that you’ve never heard of who blow the top blogs out of the water when it comes to unique visitors and ad impressions.

4. Ad placement and ad type
There are a lot of tips and tricks that can be used to double or triple ad revenue depending on the site. Testing various ad locations, colors, sizes, and styles can lead to much better results. It doesn’t sound like Guy was doing any of this, so I’d estimate he could have at least doubled his revenue if he had.

The bottom line though is to branch out to multiple ad sources and revenue streams as Darren Rowse, John Chow, myself, and others have suggested. It’s the best way to grow revenue, and not have all your eggs in one basket.

Posted in: Ad Networks, Advertising, Blogging, Publishing, Random

Right Media 2007 Internal Memo

January 2, 2007 4:53 pm / Leave a Comment / Pat McCarthy

Since we’re about transparency and being open with advertising, why not do the same with internal company memos? Our CEO Michael Walrath sent a “year end wrap-up/looking ahead email for employees” that we ended up putting on the Right Media blog.

Michael makes a comparison to how the search advertising market of today was projected way too lower a few years back due to projections not foreseeing the improvements made by Google and Yahoo in monetization of that search inventory. He says the same situation could be occurring with the glut of display ad inventory that’s being created with user generated content, and that projections today might not be including the improvements in monetization that companies like Right Media are working on.

Definitely worth a read.

Posted in: Ad Networks, Advertising, Publishing, Random, Right Media

Post Navigation

← Older Posts
Newer Posts →

Follow Pat

@patmccarthy
Facebook
Quora
LinkedIn
Tumblr
RebelMouse

Categories

  • Acquisitions
  • Ad Exchanges
  • Ad Networks
  • Advertising
  • Apple
  • AppNexus
  • Blogging
  • Conferences
  • Conversion Rate
  • Direct Media Exchange
  • Ecommerce
  • Facebook
  • Fantuition
  • Featured
  • Google
  • Microsoft
  • Music
  • Oregon Ducks
  • Personal
  • Publishing
  • Random
  • Right Media
  • Social Networks
  • Startups
  • Twitter
  • Web 2.0
  • Web Analytics
  • Yahoo

Recent Posts

  • How is Data Science in Advertising Like the NBA?
  • Coming Back to Blogging
  • What It Feels Like To Be Acqhired
  • How Facebook Will Become The Biggest Ad Network
  • Should Yahoo!’s Strategy Be To Focus On Women?
© Copyright 2021 - ConversionRater
Infinity Theme by DesignCoral / WordPress