Posts filed under 'Ad Networks'
A space that’s been full of promise for the past few in the online advertising world is behavioral targeting. It’s actually probably been talked about far more than it’s been put into practice, but most studies and tests seem to show that it always provides much better results than showing users random ads.
Who’s been doing it? Well, Yahoo has been a leader due to all the data they have on a user as well as the massive reach, and a couple of ad networks with a focus on it are Tacoda and Revenue Science. You could make an argument that Google is doing behavioral targeting by showing you ads based on what you’re searching for, but I’m not sure it fits the standard definition perfectly.
The concept is great. You store data on users and where they go and what they do, then find them in other places and show them ads related to what they are interested in. The problem is that to work effectively companies end up needing a lot of data and a massive reach to find users they have information on in the right places to show them ads. It’s really been the primary reason that this type of targeting has been slow to pick up.
Now comes news that Microsoft is getting serious about it. I guess they’ve been testing it for over a year, but I was surprised that they weren’t already offering this to advertisers. After I got over that, I read an interesting post on HipMojo.com that theorizes that Microsoft will acquire an advertising network to expand it’s reach. Being that reach has been a problem for behavioral marketers, this seems to make sense. Especially when most people think AOL’s purchase of Advertising.com was a smart move for AOL. Who does HipMojo.com suggest they might acquire?
- aQuantive
- Valueclick
- Tribal Fusion
- Revenue Science
- Tacoda
- etc.
aQuantive is the operator of ad server Atlas DMT which is heavily used by agencies and large online advertisers. That could potentially provide a lot of reach in some ways, but Atlas has not been that known for having publisher relationships, although they recently acquired ad serving company Accipter which is more known to be an ad server for publishers.
Valueclick operates a number of businesses such as Commission Junction so it might be more than Microsoft needs if they’re looking for reach, but Valueclick’s ad network is one of the largest.
Tribal Fusion is more of a pure play network and may have a higher inventory quality than Valueclick, but it’s reach is most likely less.
Revenue Science and Tacoda are both leaders in behavioral targeting so that may make sense for technology reasons, but they also don’t have the reach of the larger players mentioned above.
Many interesting options, and it’s the first prediction I’ve seen that suggests Microsoft would acquire an ad network. In some ways I think it’s unlikely because Microsoft may figure they have the reach they need with all their properties, but I’m not sure they really do on the level they need to make it work. I’m not sure advertisers are thinking of going to Microsoft today as much as Microsoft would like, and maybe an acquisition like this would make them more of a player in the online advertising space.
December 31st, 2006
A few weeks ago I started a live case study of launching a website aimed at earning advertising revenue, the VoFiles Project. It’s time to talk about how to determine a website’s initial advertising strategy in four easy steps, as well as our first update on the progress of VoFiles.com.
I’ll talk in general terms about determining advertising strategy, and also describe how we went about it for VoFiles.com.
1. Evaluate advertising opportunties
Anytime you launch a new website, you should already have an idea of what plans you have for earning revenue. For the purpose of this discussion we’ll assume advertising is one of the main revenue strategies for your site. Now, where do we go from here? It’s not as simple as just deciding to go after advertising, there are many choices as to how you go about it, and you can often work with multiple strategies.
Premium Advertising
Also known as brand advertising, directly-sold advertising, sponsorships, or endemic advertising, this is advertising you sell yourself, most likely to companies within your topic or industry. There are a few companies that can help represent your inventory for you, but most of them actually classify more as small ad marketplaces. This is generally the most lucrative form of advertising, but it usually requires a high traffic site or a site that is a leader in it’s topic. It also requires the most amount of effort to sell, manage, bill, and invoice. The bottom line is that very few new sites can sell premium advertising right off the bat unless they start out with a lot of momentum and a connected management team. I’d generally suggest planning for this later down the line when a site is more established.
Contextual Advertising
Most people will simply know this as Google Adsense, but there are other players of course like the Yahoo Publisher Network. This type of advertising can be a huge success for a lot of focused sites in certain industries. The pages of your site need enough content to allow the contextual engines to find appropriate ads, and you need users that will take some action and click on ads. This is a common choice for a lot of new sites, and it’s generally easy to setup. One thing to be aware of is that it can give your site a less than professional feel if you’re really looking to sell high quality targeted ads in the future. There are some other contextual solutions that offer some different things like Amazon Omakase, Chitika, and Quigo Adsonar.
General CPM Display Advertising
One of the most popular forms of advertising is general display ads like banners, leaderboards, skyscrapers, and rectangles that are supplied by a bevy of ad networks. This is very easy to set up, and because most of the networks pay on a CPM basis you earn revenue whether uses click on ads. Sites that don’t have much content or may be more general in nature will usually find better results with this than contextual networks. Many networks do have strict requirements on what type of sites they’ll accept and also have minimum traffic requirements. It’s also a very natural lead in to selling targeted display advertising in the future as your users won’t notice much difference except an improvement in targeting and relevance most likely. The networks in this space have different specialties, strengths, and weaknesses. Some of the major players are Remix Media, Burst Media, Valueclick, Tribal Fusion, Advertising.com, CPX Interactive, Tacoda, and more. Of course, I could talk for hours on how this type of advertising should be auctioned through an exchange like the Right Media Exchange using a product like RMX Direct, but we’ll save that for later.
CPA/Affiliate
Cost Per Action (CPA) and affiliate advertising is a high risk/high reward form of advertising that works amazingly well for certain publishers, and horribly for others. The premise is that you get paid when you drive a user to an advertiser who pays you when that user performs the action the advertiser wants them to perform. This works really well for sites that recommend users buy things, or other classic affiliate sites like ring tones, software, ebooks, etc. There are actually affiliate networks like AzoogleAds and Commission Junction, but often you can work directly with an advertiser like Amazon.
Text Links/Ads, RSS, and Marketplaces
There are companies that sell text links on your site like Text Link Ads and Adbrite. Also companies that can sell ads in RSS feeds like Feedburner and Pheedo, or other marketplaces like Adify, Adster, and Performancing.
For VoFiles, we knew that selling premium advertising was probably unlikely because of general content as well as the social network audience not being the most desirable to advertisers. The trade off is that because VoFiles is in the booming social networking space, we’re hoping to use sheer traffic volume on ads that pay less to generate revenue. Which is easier? A targeted site is probably easier, but we wanted to explore the social networking “studio space”. Now that we know that our goal is to aim for traffic volume we can plan accordingly. Because our pages are not filled with focused content, contextual advertising is also a bit of a challenge, but still possible. The obvious choice was to start off with display advertising networks, with an eye toward the future in contextual ads as well as text ads and joining a few marketplaces.
After evaluating all those options, it’s time to choose your tool.
2. Choosing a Tool to Manage Ads
Depending on what type of advertising options above you choose, you’ll need a good tool of some type to manage your ads. Most of the above solutions provide an “ad tag” which is basically some type of javascript or similar code that puts the ads on your site. However, if you plan on running multiple types of advertising, you’ll need a tool to manage it all.
Ad Servers
The most common tool used to manage web advertising is ad servers. They generally can manage graphical display advertising whether it’s premium or ad networks, contextual advertising, and affiliate advertising. Very few do much with text links at this point. There is quite a range of ad serving options. You have everything from an ad server meant for premium like DART from Doubleclick, to a smart ad server like Right Media’s PMX product made for yield management and maximization or remnant inventory, to something free like phpAdsNew. Most ad servers do have fees associated with them since they provide bandwidth, support, hosting of data, and other services.
Revenue Management Platforms
If you are just getting started with advertising on your site, or you are primarily working with contextual or display ad networks, then a revenue management platform like RMX Direct is the best choice for you. RMX Direct is neither an ad server alone or an ad network, but combines the best of both worlds while allowing you to manage and auction your inventory to any ad networks you’re working with, as well as work directly with ad networks on the Right Media Exchange through the tool. It’s a free tool which makes it easy to get up and going and monetizing your ad inventory right away, while also not locking you into working with one ad provider.
Other Random Tools
There are quite a few other random blog plugins, PHP scripts, and purchaseable tools that can be used to help manage your ad inventory in various ways. There are too many list, and not that many I’d really recommend.
When we looked at tools for VoFiles.com, we knew that premium advertising was most likely not going to be a huge part of our advertising mix, so RMX Direct made the most sense for us as a way to manage our ad network relationships. It not only allows us to get all the networks and advertisers on the Right Media Exchange auctioning for our inventory, but allows us to auction ad networks like Adsense, Yahoo Publisher Network, Valueclick, and more.
If we end up using some of the various ad marketplaces, we will most likely just have to place their code directly on our pages as they don’t fit their ads in standard ad sizes.
3. Placing Ads on your Site
After you have your types of advertising picked out as well as the tools in place to manage it all, it’s time to choose where to place your ads on your site. This is something I refer to as the “advertising balancing act”. As a publisher, you want to make as much money as possible. In order to reach that goal you need to place ads where users are most likely to see/click/act on them. However, this usually leads to a worse user experience on your site as ads can make your design and usability worse, they can distract users from their core tasks, or generally just get in the way. An argument can be made that really highly targeted and useful ads can help a user’s experience, but generally this isn’t the case. So how do you balance the need to make money with the need to please your users and keep them coming back?
Unfortunately, there is no easy answer to this equation, it’s really up to you as a publisher to analyze how much advertising your users will put up with and where it should be placed on your site. I’ve seen sites that are successful with very little advertising that blends in perfectly with their site, and also seen sites that have blatant and annoying advertising all over the place that users seem to deal with just fine.
I can recommend look at the heat map provided by Google Adsense to get a general idea for which areas of a web page usually see the best ad results. The darker the color on the map, the more successful ads are in that area. As you can see from the map, the best place to put an ad is smack dab in the middle of a page where a user is used to seeing real content. So that ad space is the most valuable, but also the most annoying spot for users to see an ad.
For VoFiles.com we decided to place our ads in standard locations without getting too much in the way of the user. Our 468×60 banner ad is placed in a central location near the top of the page. 728×90 leaderboard ads usually pay more, but didn’t fit into our design. We put a wide 160×600 skyscraper about middle way down the page on the right side in the column, and then on the actual profile content pages we add a 300×250 rectangle box in the middle right under the meat of the content. We will most likely add more ad placements on the page over time, as well as some text ad advertising in the right column.
4. Monitoring Your Results and Testing
The last piece of the puzzle which often separates publishers from decent success to great success is continuing to monitor your ad results and continually test.
Monitoring Results
Just like with web analytics, analyzing advertising results is very important to recognize changes and make the most of your ad inventory. Using a good ad server or revenue management platform like RMX Direct will help you have access to good reporting data that will allow you test different ad placements, geotargeting, frequency-capping, and other techniques to squeeze the most revenue possible out of your inventory.
Testing
Most people just think moving around where your ads are located is all there is to testing. While that is a great thing to test, don’t forget to test other ad sizes, and most importantly test as many ad networks, ad marketplaces, and different advertising avenues as possible. Also, tests should be rerun in different times of the year, because what worked in January might have different results in July.
VoFiles Progress Update
Instead of weekly statistical updates as I had suggested, I’m going to do monthly updates on VoFiles statistical progress. It’s unlikely I would really get weekly updates accomplished, and in most weeks there probably wouldn’t be much change worth noting. December will be the first full month of stats for VoFiles, so we’ll do a first month stat update at the beginning of January.
Regarding the progress of the site, we haven’t really done much marketing at all yet. We’ve added some profiles, and done some informal user studies which has taught us that many social network users don’t really get what to do on VoFiles since they aren’t used to the voting concept made popular by Digg. The quickest solution is to add more obvious instructions, but I think for long term success we need to change to something along the lines of a monthly voting model. Basically, the votes will last for a month so that a user could be voted “Best Profile Layout” for the month of January. This should be easier to understand, provide something for users who have profiles submitted to shoot for, and hopefully lead to more viral spreading of the site among social networks. We also need to develop some badges for profiles to promote voting or show that a user has won a VoFiles monthly category.
It has proved to fill our needs in some ways so far to test various parts of RMX Direct, but we definitely need more traffic and users to be accepted by other ad networks and get a full geographical spectrum of users.
Google Page Rank: 0/10
Alexa Rank: 167,833 (Skewed way too high, our traffic doesn’t back this up)
Alexa Graph:
December 29th, 2006
It’s always a good feeling when people see the possibilities in something you’re involved in, and Matt McAlister of Yahoo is seeing the light with RMX Direct.
His description of how the application works is pretty accurate, although I would add that it not only allows publishers to get ads from the networks that are part of our exchange, but it also allows you to auction and manage networks like YPN, Adsense, Valueclick, Feedburner, and others.
I also agree with Matt that Feedburner is doing very interesting things, and their commitment to publishers is outstanding.
RMX Direct is still early in its life, and we’re hoping to continually talk to people like Matt to explore the possibilities on ways publishers can interact with and benefit from the Right Media Exchange.
If you are a web publisher with an interest in advertising, I’d love to talk to you.
December 17th, 2006
As I predicted just last week, people are going to start talking more about remnant inventory and how to monetize it. My first example was Yahoo, and now AOL is saying they see a big future in ad networks.
The article seems to be talking about the role of networks with video advertising, but the concepts are the same for display or video. There is an explosion of ad inventory on the web as user-generated content continues to explode. It’s impossible for publishers to scale sales teams fast enough and well enough to sell out their inventory at rates they’d like to see. It’s only natural that whether it’s video or display ad networks, or better yet advertising exchanges, will be a huge factor in monetizing this inventory.
To quote consultant Shelley Palmer in the AOL article:
“The ad networks are the next big thing. It’s the only thing that makes any sense at all,” Mr. Palmer said. “Ad networks are going to be hugely important to the way you aggregate all your station affiliates. All that quantity needs to be qualitatively optimized.”
The networks/exchanges that can streamline the processes and monetize the inventory through relationships and optimization will win.
December 13th, 2006
The past couple of years has been great for online advertising. The market has grown tremendously, and with it there are more options out there for publishers and advertisers to get together to make money. I’m a big fan of this as a long time web publisher and small advertiser. I don’t want one or two companies dominating the online advertising world because I know that competition brings out the best in companies and choice is very important.
That being said, while I support and love to see the multitude of “ad marketplace” type of companies on the market, I see some things that make me wonder how they will get to be major players in the space.
So who am I talking about here? In the past two years we’ve seen Adbrite, BlogAds, Performancing Partners, Adify, Adster, and other marketplaces where advertisers essentially directly buy on publishers sites. There are some differences in these companies’ models, but they all hold true to the idea that advertisers buy on publishers or some type of category of publishers.
As a publisher I’ve found these solutions to be easy to work with, and have had moderate success with some of them. From my experiences and what I’ve found out from others, the biggest sites in their “marketplaces” tend to do the best from them, which is really no surprise. The biggest problem though is that often there just aren’t enough advertisers buying my sites, and many others have given me that feedback, and this is a crucial problem. If publishers don’t get ad buys through them, what’s the point in leaving the space available on your site and dealing with yet another ad provider?
Let’s look at it from an advertiser point of view. I’ve used a few of these sites as an advertiser as well. Again, they’ve done a pretty good job with the experience, but there are some inherent problems.
1. Volume and Time
The most popular platform for online advertising is Google Adwords. Although Adwords is a well-made product, the primary reason for that is because Adwords delivers quality and volume through Google Search. Advertisers can spend the time and effort to learn the Adwords interface because it will drive a high enough volume of clicks and conversions to make it worth the time. Because there is so much volume, it also allows lots of clicks to be bought at a low cost.
There is a huge drop off from the number that buy on Adwords to the number that buy on the next biggest self-service platform, which would be Yahoo Search Marketing. Then an even bigger drop off to MSN Adcenter. Then an even bigger drop off to these small marketplaces. Why does this occur? Each ad system I work with as an advertiser is another thing to learn, and to spend time on, and people use Google primarily because of the volume (and quality). You spend a few hours setting things up, and you get a large number of clicks and conversions. You spend the same time buying on a smaller marketplace and you aren’t going to get close to as much volume.
With these other smaller ad marketplaces, each one is a new interface to learn, and advertisers aren’t sure if they can drive the necessary volume to dedicate the effort to trying it out or sticking with it. I’ve tried a few of them and had this exact experience. It’s not always a case of just increasing your budget either. If you are looking for targeted traffic, you can’t just blow the bank on a small marketplace trying to drive larger volume and get what you want. So in my tests, I spent the time to learn these new marketplaces but couldn’t drive enough volume to justify continually monitoring and spending money there. My failure as an advertiser in turn hurts the publisher on the other side because they are no longer getting my money.
2. Hitting ROI
Additionally, very few ad marketplaces provide feedback on ROI, or guarantee that as an advertiser you’ll hit your ROI goals. In fact, I don’t think any of them do, although using Google conversion code and Google Analytics you can figure it out. Anyway, my point is that as an advertiser, I have to track and watch all the ads I’m buying to make sure I stay profitable. For the few places that provide me volume, I’ll do the manual effort with spreadsheets or some third-party application to track my ROI. Will I really have time as an advertiser to watch my ROI and check my profitability on a bunch of smaller buys on all the ad marketplaces? Personally I found that I didn’t.
What does this mean for the future?
How do these smaller “ad marketplaces” get to the next step? I don’t have the golden answer. You can tackle the volume problem by getting more quality inventory, but how do you get more quality inventory unless you are getting lots of advertisers spending their money with you? Do you shrink your revenue share to increase payouts in the short term? Do you focus on building publisher tools that allow them to work with you before you have the advertisers? It may just be that the company that can grind it out the best will win. But perhaps it means someone needs to take the next step in evolution? Perhaps it’s a company that opens all their data up for any use?
In regards to meeting ROI for advertisers automatically, on the Right Media Exchange advertisers can specify ROI goals that our technology then works to hit for them. At this point we don’t have a small to medium-sized advertiser solution, but if we do you can bet hitting ROI will be part of it.
It will be interesting to watch it play out. All the competition is good for publishers, but if all the ad dollars are fragmented out across all the small marketplaces it makes it hard for publishers to work with all of them to get the maximum revenue.
December 11th, 2006
As we continue to build RMX Direct at Right Media, the situation comes up where we need to test new features or debug a problem using a site that is owned by an employee so that it’s not a real customer having to test for us.
Previously, we used to use a site known as Whoomp.com operated by myself, Cameron McNeeley, and Dave Barousse. It worked quite well, except that the site required the constant updating of content to keep up high enough traffic levels so that we could test effectively, and some ad networks require certain traffic levels to accept your site. We have jobs that we love as well as friends and family to be with so we didn’t have really have time to keep Whoomp.com going, so we sold the site.
One might suggest that we just create some quick test site, but many of our tests require steady traffic levels, users from many geographic regions, and that we have enough traffic to get accepted by most ad networks.
As it became more obvious we were in dire need of a legitimate site, the former Whoomp.com team huddled up to brainstorm and create a site that fulfilled the following requirements:
- We must be able to create the site in a night or two of work.
- The site must have user-generated content so that it runs itself.
- The site should have some viral element so that it can grow to a decent traffic level without us spending time marketing it.
- Due to the nature of a lot of our clients, having social features or some relation to social networks keeps us in the same area as many of our clients.
- It must be suitable to run advertising on and get accepted by ad networks.
Additionally, we decided it’d be great to “live blog” the launch and growth of the site so that we could educate our publishers and anyone else out there interested in starting a website with advertising as a revenue model. The focus will be on growing the advertising revenue, and how to work with RMX Direct to do so. We plan on sharing all our traffic and advertising revenue stats in the process. The proof is in the pudding right?
I also plan on blogging about any successful marketing tactics, interesting stories, or anything else that seems blog worthy related to it.
After 15 minutes much deliberation, we came up with VoFiles.com. VoFiles is a play on the Digg-style voting site, except changed to voting on social network profiles in different categories. Is it a unique and genius business model destined for huge success? No, but we hadn’t seen such a site for voting on profiles, and it satisfies all the criteria laid out above.
It was quick to build using the open source code from Pligg, word has already started to spread a bit and random people are adding content, and if it catches on in any of the social networks we should be able to generate enough traffic to make it a site we can test with.
Naturally, we can use any help you can give to get the ball rolling. If you’d like to link to VoFiles, submit profiles, vote on profiles, subscribe to the RSS feed, or provide any suggestions, you are welcome to do so.
Expect a post soon outlining our initial advertising setup and strategy.
Now, for our first of what will hopefully be weekly check-ins on VoFiles’ progress in growth and advertising. The following data is all for the previous week of when I report it:
NOVERMBER 26-DECEMBER 2nd
User Accounts: 10
Visits: 65
Page Views: 546
Ad Revenue: $0.32
Overall eCPM: $0.18
Google Page Rank: 0/10
Alexa Rank: 594,900
Alexa Graph:
RMX Direct Advertiser Report: (click to enlarge)
December 5th, 2006
The following is a guest post from Right Media CTO Brian O’Kelley:
Feedback on the Yahoo newspaper deal has started to trickle in, and what’s surprising is the limited attention this deal has generated in context of its effects on other industry players. Before I start to opine, please note that I have no inside information about this deal (even though I do work closely with Yahoo) and that these are my opinions as a pundit, not as Right Media’s CTO.
Much has been made in the last few years about Tacoda and Revenue Science and their ability to create behavioral profiles on newspaper and other highly contextual sites. For quite a while, it seemed like these guys were going to define the space. However, because they relied on their clients to sell the behavioral concept to agencies, they had to retool as network businesses. Meanwhile, a number of companies, like Yahoo, built their own BT profiles using proprietary data. With deep credibility and an existing customer base to upsell, they took BT from the fringe to the mainstream.
But Yahoo still lacked the powerful contextual source of data that the other players already had: newspapers. Fortunately, they had the agency relationships and credibility to help the newspapers realize the potential locked inside their context and user base. Look at the recent announcement in this context. Yahoo grabs a new behavioral data source to mine – and perhaps access to the inventory to resell behaviorally. How can Tacoda compete?
Take it to the next level. Why wouldn’t these publishers think about plugging in Yahoo’s entire ad serving capability? They’d get world class behavioral, contextual, inventory forecasting, and other technologies. They have leverage and credibility. They understand how to work with an existing sales force. Doesn’t that threaten 24/7 in their core market? Doesn’t this make it that much harder for Google and other networks? And what about MSN, who’s still not really in market?
Why is the market bashing Yahoo? This is brilliant. I’m hesitant to even bring attention to it, because I’d rather see them just finish the play, but the market needs to recognize that they’re playing the media game better than anyone else. And you don’t have to be perfect on the technical side to win in media – you can partner for that, and leverage the best of breed where you can.
Just my 2 cents.
November 27th, 2006
I was looking forward to the Yahoo Web 2.0 Strategy session as there have been a lot of questions about Yahoo’s strategy since they missed the YouTube deal and haven’t acquired Facebook. While I think it’s pretty strange to really judge their strategy based on those two things alone, I was hoping this session shed some light. It started off a bit slow as an overview, but delivered some interesting things at the end.
Yahoo and Social Media
Eckart Walther, the Vice President of Product Management for Yahoo! Search led off. Eckart went through a powerpoint that gave some basic definitions of social media and how Yahoo feels about it. He pointed out that Yahoo’s mission is to “Enrich people’s lives by enabling them to find, use, share, and expand the world’s knowledge.” Obviously, social media and much of what Web 2.0 seems to be about fits their mission well.
He also defined it as “Anyone with a XXXXX is now a XXXXX.” So, anyone with a keyboard is now an author. Or anyone with a camera is now a photographer. Anyone with a computer is now a publisher. Basically, users are now empowered.
He broke down what they’re seeing in four categories:
1. User generated content. Flickr is an example of this as users generate all the content.
2. User organized content. This is where del.icio.us comes in, as it’s really about organizing URLs through tagging.
3. User and publisher distributed content.
4. User developed functionality. Mashups like combining Yahoo Maps with Flickr to create geotagging.
He ended with pointing out that Yahoo is the world’s largest community.
Integrating Advertisers with Web 2.0
Next up was Colin (I think) Fishburn. He’s the Director of the Client Strategist Group which means he’s responsible with helping integrate advertisers into Yahoo’s social properties. Colin led off with a bang by declaring that “the killer app of the web is really other people.” He pointed out the media evolution that’s occurred from moving from people consuming Mass Media (newspapers, broadcast TVs), to consuming My Media (My Yahoo! and personalized web apps), to We Media (social applications of Web 2.0).
When they look at brand partnerships on these properties they want them to be:
1. Great for the users
2. Great for the advertisers
3. Great for Yahoo!
This limits what they can do, as they don’t think it’s great for users to slap advertising all over communities like Flickr and del.icio.us. Instead, he gave a couple of examples of what they’ve done:
Nikon Stunning Gallery
Nikon Cameras created a web site using the Flickr APIs to show off images that were being taken with their cameras. Users tag pictures with nikonstunninggallery to have them show up on the site. Nikon then took the top 16 submitters and gave them a new camera they had released, then used the images those submitters took with the camera in national ad campaigns where their pictures were used in magazines such as National Geographic and others. I thought this was a great example of a creative way to partner with an advertiser in a social media context.
One.org
This is an organization and site based on working to end poverty. They used Flickr, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Answers, Google Video (strange but true), Yahoo! Maps, and other services to power all the various parts of the site. Basically, the site is an organized mashup of Yahoo services aimed at a particular audience. And yes, Bono is involved.
The 9
Yahoo! teamed up with Pepsi to create an online show that highlights nine funny/interesting videos out there on the web. They integrated Pepsi throughout the site and built it together in a collaborative project.
Nissan Live Sets on Yahoo!
Yahoo! Music teamed up with Nissan to create a new version of the AOL Sessions concept where musical artists come and record a special set of songs. The difference is that Yahoo! is also involving the fans by bringing in 250 fans of the artist and giving them Nokia phones enabled with Flickr access so the fans can take shots during the show that get added to the Nissan Live Sets site. Of course the video of the performance can be watched, songs can be downloaded, and they cut an EP from it as well. It’s very new and they are very excited about it.
What’s interesting is all these things had flown under the radar for me, and I think Yahoo! is that way right now. Not everything they do gets spread all over the blogosphere like Google, and they have a lot of interesting content initiatives going on all over the place. While it might not get as much buzz, I think Yahoo! is really delivering some applications that general consumers will be heavily involved with.
What Publishers Want
Next up was Josh Meyers, Senior Director of Yahoo! Publisher Network and GM of Domain Match.
Josh focused his talk on the four main things publishers want:
1. Content
2. Audience
3. Monetization
4. Control
The Yahoo! Publisher Network vision then is to satisfy these things and enable consumers and businesses of all sizes to realize the full value of publishing.
How do they do it?
1. Content – Yahoo has a broad set of content offerings they can offer to publishers. The One.org site is an example of using Yahoo! content to add or create a site with. Personally, I think this is a huge opportunity that they need to package better and include in the Yahoo! Publisher Network interface. As a publisher, how can I get Yahoo Answers content integrated on my site? Yahoo Groups? Flickr feeds? Yahoo Videos? Package this up and put it in the interface. This would be a way Yahoo! could differentiate from Adsense and it’s offerings as they own far more content than Google.
2. Audience – Josh mentioned My Yahoo! and other ways in which Yahoo! could actually drive audience to publishers. Besides My Yahoo! I couldn’t think of any other examples of them pushing audience to publishers. I guess one could consider del.icio.us and MyWeb as Yahoo auidence that ends up clicking through to publishers. Again though, these opportunities should be packaged in some way to make it easy for Yahoo! Publisher Network publishers to take advantage of it.
3. Monetize – Yahoo! Publisher Network is what monetizes for publishers. They have their normal contextual ads, sponsored search, and even provide display advertising for some publishers. I think the “Panama” Yahoo Search Marketing platform update should help bring more advertising dollars into their network.
4. Control – Allow publishers control over their advertising, and they also are counting on the Yahoo! Developer Network and APIs to help give publishers control to build tools.
That sums it up. What stood out to me was the brand advertising integration examples and the opportunity Yahoo! Publisher Network has if they can package their tools and content to be used by publishers in better ways.
(Full Disclosure: Yahoo! is a minority investor in my employer Right Media, but these opinions are my own.)
November 7th, 2006
There’s been a lot of press coverage of the investment Yahoo made into Right Media last week.
One thing that stood out to me is that the most interesting analysis came from bloggers instead of media publications. One recent blog post stood out to me, and that was an analysis called Yahoo’s “Right” Decision by Bill Wise, the CEO of Did-It.com.
It’s worth a full read, but some highlight quotes for those who are lazy or in a hurry:
Yahoo has the second-largest search engine; that engine is funded almost entirely by auction-based advertising. Yahoo is also the Internet’s largest portal, and therefore one of the world’s largest publisher networks. But until now, the two sides of the business lived very different lives: the successful search side monetizes through auction-based advertising, while the publisher side has monetized through far more traditional models for network buys. With its purchase of Right Media, Yahoo can now bring its publisher monetization in line with its search business for all of Yahoo’s remnant space—and that’s key to effective yield management to complement online brand buys.
First I should note that Yahoo didn’t entirely purchase Right Media as mentioned in that quote, it was a 20% investment. Regardless, the PPC search world has shown that auctioning can be a very efficient and profitable way to deal with advertising, and we bring those traits to the display advertising world with our exchange. I think Yahoo understands this and we’re all very anxious to explore the ways we can tie Yahoo’s various advertising business lines with our exchange.
But the value of the Right Media investment is more than just a way to fix the Yahoo portal’s monetization model. It’s an opportunity for Yahoo to capitalize on its strengths and come into its own in the online world, and out from beneath Google’s long shadow. And it manages to do all this while delivering a wonderful strategic counter to GoogTube, which will undeniably expand Google’s reach well beyond search, and far into content.
Well, I think Yahoo has already come into their own long ago, but I hope Right Media continues to grow and drive large returns for Yahoo which can help them continue to compete in an ever-changing web world. We’re definitely a unique model at this point, and there are many possibilities out there for how the exchange model can help the industry as a whole.
Yahoo clearly knows something about the world of online visuals, as well, whether you’re talking about the display ads and image and video content it offers on its portal; Yahoo video search, which predates Google Video by roughly two years; or its farsighted purchase of photosharing site Flickr, which Yahoo bought when YouTube was only a few weeks old. Yahoo clearly understands the worlds of content and online graphical display, and the investment in Right Media and the placement of the auction media model within the Yahoo portal means that Yahoo can now unlock a huge potential that it’s been sitting on for a long time, and truly begin to monetize its greatest strengths.
That’s just an awesome summary. It makes me even more excited to get to work when reading that.
And that’s why I predict a new online world order, coming soon. Yahoo, funded by the monetization through auction-based display ads and its large display network, will be able to solidify its lead in both content and graphical ads. It will become for content and graphical display what Google is for search and text links. How crucial will this change be in online history?
I like that prediction. How crucial will that change be?
October 24th, 2006
I respect WebreakStuff quite a bit, but Frederick’s recent post about needing more relevant ads is a theme I hear a lot when talking to web publishers.
Publishers often ask me (Right Media/RMX Direct) to find them more targeted ads, and it seems to be a common thought expressed by them. It’s also common to see regular consumers such as Frederick say that they’d appreciate it if ads were more relevant, and everyone acts as if advertising companies aren’t trying or don’t want do to that.
I work in advertising, and I don’t love ads, but I know what advertising does for web publishers. It provides them revenue to keep their sites free of membership feeds, it allows them to keep publishing and pay hosting costs, or it allows them to hire a staff and make their website into a real business. These are all great things for web users who enjoy web sites for free.
So to me, advertising pays a very important role in supporting the “free” publishing world we’ve become accustomed to on the web.
That being said, I’d also like to see more relevant ads. But what I don’t think people are understanding is that there aren’t as many advertisers with unlimited budgets as they all seem to think exist. Even Google who has the largest selection of advertisers hitting the broadest amount of categories often shows totally irrelevant Adsense ads on publisher sites because they don’t even have enough targeted advertisers to fit that type of content.
When I ran a site on the sport of wakeboarding, I had to work my ass off to pursue, sell, optimize, and support targeted advertisers I was selling to directly. There’s no way I could have expected an ad network to provide me with those advertisers because they didn’t have the budget or need to go through an ad network. Adsense ads also didn’t provide many more than a few advertisers that didn’t pay very well for clicks, so even though they were relevant they weren’t very profitable for me as a publisher. I had to do a lot of manual work, and frankly many publishers aren’t going to have the time and skill to pull this off, or their industry just doesn’t have retailers and product companies like wakeboarding.
Let’s take a look from the ad network point of view. Let’s say we have a video game publisher who wants relevant advertisers to video gaming. It’s a bigger category than wakeboarding so it should work right? The network goes out and finds a couple of advertisers, but they have budgets, only want to run on certain sites, and need to achieve certain goals and results. Spread out across the 20 video game sites in my network, they each don’t end up receiving that many ads, and then what are they supposed to do with the rest of their ad inventory? Show irrelevant ads is really one of their only options.
And as unfortunate as it may seem to a user, irelevant ads do perform well enough for advertisers and publishers in many instances that they are profitable. And that profit helps keep their businesses running letting you read content on the web for free.
We’re trying to help this problem at Right Media by growing our exchange with as many buyers and sellers as possible. The more buyers we have, the more targeted ads we could end up serving to users and publishers.
I just don’t like the assumption that ad companies aren’t doing their job because ads aren’t relevant enough. There is constant work being done to improve targeting and provide more opportunities, but their still remains a shortage in enough targeted advertising to go around to make everyone happy and profitable.
We’re trying to help solve this problem at Right Media
October 17th, 2006
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