AdAge produced some good content on the the state of ad networks and ad exchanges in 2009. There’s numerous articles on a number of topics, but “Why Ad Exchanges are Picking Up Steam” hits closest to home for me being a Yahoo. I may update this with some more thoughts when I get a moment…
Add comment April 27th, 2009
Good story over the weekend in the New York Times about the newspapers success with APT from Yahoo!. I actually was walking right by Hilary and Lem coming from the cafeteria at Yahoo! when they were taking these photos.
The newspaper industry is obviously going through major pains right now, along with the rest of the economy, but there are some definite bright spots into how they can adapt and thrive in the future through encouraging and mastering local online advertising.
Add comment March 2nd, 2009
Cool announcement from my employer today, as they’ve announced the beta testing of “Rich Ads” in search results.
There’s a few things I am liking about this:
2 comments February 19th, 2009
The story of Markus Frind and the success of Plentyoffish.com has been covered before and is pretty well known to those who follow the web publishing world closely. Inc.com goes a bit deeper though than previous stories, so it’s interesting to learn a bit more about Frind and his background and the success Plentyoffish.com has received.
There are some good lessons in his story.
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2 comments January 9th, 2009
Another study, this time from Specific Media which is a very smart ad network, showing that display advertising along with search advertising provides a lot of advantage over just advertising on search alone.
This seems to make total sense to me, and many studies have showed it to be true. My question, how many advertisers act upon this? I know a lot of the huge companies do this, but most of the smaller search advertisers I know don’t buy display because they don’t think it’s effective or it’s too hard to buy compared to search. These studies help the effectiveness, but I don’t think the nut on ease of purchase is cracked yet.
1 comment January 7th, 2009
Doug Wintz has a nice article about common ad operations disasters that can occur for publishers who are large enough to have sales and ad operations teams.
Since this is usually one of the largest revenue streams for publishers, it’s always been surprising to me you don’t see more discussion about how to optimize and improve this area of business. The technology in this area has been pretty slow to improve until the last few years. Now the major players are all building new and improved ad serving technology that should help improve ad operations for publishers who are forward thinking and embrace the new tools out there.
Add comment September 8th, 2008
Most publishers talk about the risks of getting dangerous or unwanted ad creatives from ad networks, but as Greg points out it looks as though they should also be careful with who they sell their inventory directly to, and what kind of ad code that advertiser is choosing to run on their site.
Kudos to Mike for noticing this, he’s like the malvertisement equivalent of Batman.
Add comment August 20th, 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.
5 comments July 30th, 2008
Scoble posted today about the “Silicon Valley VC Disease”, which can best be summarized as only investing in companies that are addressing markets that are big today and have a good chance at earning revenue over the next couple of years.
I don’t hang out with VCs enough to know whether Scoble is right, but what interested me about the post was that he was using investing in iPhone applications as an example of what they generally aren’t investing in because the market is still so small.
I’ll say this, the iPhone and its applications are going to be big. The market may be small today, but it’s just going to continue to grow. As a first generation iPhone owner I was already addicted to my phone and only kept using my Blackberry because I couldn’t get my work email on my iPhone.
The addition of the AppStore has changed things even further. Before my phone mainly served as a phone, email, and web browsing device for me. The AppStore turned it into a restaurant recommendation tool, a movie research tool, a gaming device, a remote control, etc. On a recent business trip where I was gone for three nights I realized I never turned on my hotel TV once the entire trip because when I got back to my room at night I just used my iPhone until it was time for bed. Not that I watch a ton of TV on trips, but to never even turn it on due to my phone was a definite change in my usage.
Maybe I’m an early adopter, but almost everyone I talk to is planning to get an iPhone the next time they get a phone. I’ll recommend an iPhone to my mom, and if my kids were old enough to need a phone I’d be getting them one today.
Sure, there are problems. They need to open it up more, they need more than one carrier, etc. And yes, it is possible that other phone manufacturers build similar devices by copying Apple. That doesn’t matter though if you’re thinking about building mobile apps for the platform. I’d suspect good application developers will be building apps for all mobile platforms that have enough usage, and I imagine we’ll continue to move towards one or two platforms over time.
What it does mean though, is that starting or investing in companies in this space is a great idea. Based on the usage and passion of iPhone users, it’s obvious that these phones are becoming the new computer, or at least as equally important. Getting the jump now will be a huge advantage.
There is a lot left to be figured out. Mobile advertising will need to not only grow from a functionality perspective, but advertisers and publishers will need to understand it as well.
Essentially, this is a multi-year process, but it will happen much faster than it did with computer usage and internet usage.
1 comment July 26th, 2008
Yesterday was a bit crazy. A lot of news hit, and most of it I can’t really say much about. Just a little rundown though:
Yahoo! Acquires IndexTools
This blog originally started with a focus on web analytics, so it’s near and dear to my heart. I’m excited to see how IndexTools is used both internally and externally for Yahoo!. Web analytics expert Eric Petersen has a good post about why this could be a game changer.
Former Yahoo! SVP Tim Cadogan Becomes CEO at OpenX
A great hire for OpenX, as I really enjoyed working with Tim while he was at Yahoo!. OpenX is a very interesting business right now, it’ll be fun to watch what Tim does there.
Yahoo! Tests Outsourcing Search Monetization With Google
No comment.
Yahoo! And AOL To Merge?
No comment.
NewsCorp To Join Microsoft In Yahoo! Offer?
No comment, man this blog is exciting.
AOL and Ad.com Jump Into the Small Publisher Game With PubAccess
Not too long ago I remember it was a bunch of fairly standard ad networks as the only options for small publishers. Then we launched Direct Media Exchange (formerly RMX Direct) at Right Media which was the first “tool” to help publisher manage multiple ad networks and make their lives easier. Since then we’ve seen more in this space like The Rubicon Project, PubMatic, now PubAccess, and Google’s AdManager in a less direct way. I don’t think we’ll see the last of it either.
Definitely not a slow news day in the world of Yahoo!
Add comment April 10th, 2008
