[question]
Should it matter if the pages are unique or not?
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Getting hung up on unique and page views is kind of a conflict. Unique users are individual people, no matter how often they come back or how many pages they look at. Whenever we start talking about unique, we really need to recognize that we’re talking about people. When we talk about page views we’re talking about impressions. Another way to think about it might be that the unique(s) are a net number and the page views are a gross number. You want to create a certain amount of frequency for the advertiser. If you watch TV, you notice that sometimes TV ads are run with the same commercial twice in a single commercial pod, certainly the same commercial more than once in a particular program; you want to be able to provide the same opportunity in your site to be successful for advertisers–you need frequency
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Aren’t publishers moving away from large ads such as leader-boards because of the overall negative impact on user experience and also due to banner blindness?
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Stop for a second and think to yourself about a newspaper. Now I know there’s a lot of talk about how newspapers aren’t very successful right now but newspapers have been around for hundreds of years and there have been ads in them for a long time and there still is. There’s tens of billions of dollars worth of advertising going into newspapers and there’s lots and lots of ads in there. And does everybody look at every ad? Of course they don’t, right?
Do you read every ad? Are you required to read every ad for it to be effective? And the answer of course is no. Advertising works by creating awareness and sometimes that awareness is somewhat more subconscious than it is conscious, so if you hear a lot of things written about trying to find ways for advertising to be more effective, trying to find ways for or to deal with so-called banner blindness or banner fatigue, but what I would say is there’s a $20 billion industry right now of people of advertisers buying leader-board banners and medium rectangles and the real problem is not the shape or size of those, but that some ads are a lot better than others. And so creativity is a big deal. I would go further and say that the most successful advertisers are most effective with a lot of frequency but a lot more variety. And this is probably one of the biggest things that the internet allows you to do is program multiple ad units into a queue so that the advertisers, the reader is seeing similar ads but not the same messages and that solves that problem. There’s a lot of competition around what I would call rich media ads and that’s kind of a big word for everything that doesn’t stay still in the leader-board or in the box for the rectangle, things that jump out at you when you scroll over them by accident, things that start out bigger and then close up, things that crawl across the page to make sure that they’ve got your attention. A site like PC World, a site like Forbes, a site like New York Magazine which are all three very, very successful internet businesses with very large audiences and numbers of unique(s) coming back with a high level of frequency representing 30 to almost 50-percent of the revenue coming from online while the other 50-precent comes from print. They’re doing some pretty aggressive things with advertising, pop-ups like that–when you first enter the site it’s a complete page takeover. But they can’t do that more than once without people saying screw it; I’m not coming back to this site anymore, so they still do the medium rectangles and the leader-boards inside their site and are generating by far the most revenue from that because that’s really where the volume is.
Sell what’s available. Don’t worry about trying to invent some new thing. Let somebody else do that.
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[question]
They’re saying there can be more than one impression per page, since there can be multiple ads on the page. And isn’t each ad counted as an impression?
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Yes; exactly. I encourage clients that I work with to design their pages to take either one or two ad units on the same page, sometimes three depending on the clients and the marketplace. And each impression counts separately. They could be for two separate advertisers and it would be one impression for one advertiser and another impression for another advertiser. And or it could be the same advertiser running both units; that would still count as two impressions that they’ve purchased and paid for.
And so if you take the number of page views you have, you can multiply it by two or three depending on how many ad units you design into your pages to determine how many impressions you have available for sales for what’s your gross opportunity to sell.
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[question]
How important is it for the advertiser to understand open rates and for the salesperson to share open rates?
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Email open rates matter to you as a publisher because you’re trying to evaluate at all times how effective your email program is and getting people engaged with it.
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[question]What are your thoughts on incorporating a flat fee, monthly sponsorship model into your advertising sales strategy?
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I can’t be more against it. Here’s why. You can get a little bit of money from a flat fee pricing strategy. The advertiser isn’t sure what they’re going to get because they’re not getting a guarantee of how many impressions. So they may like you; they may like your content. They’ll give you a little bit of money. But in order to get a lot of money they have to be confident of the value that they’re going to get. And the value is directly related to the impressions that are delivered by the page views. So at the beginning lots and lots of companies that I’ve worked with have said well gee whiz; we can’t do it. We can’t guarantee because we don’t know how much we’re going to deliver.
And there’s a solution to that. But the first thing is to accept the fact that if you are in the business of selling advertising, you must deliver value for value. In other words, you’ve got to deliver value that’s equal to the money they’re paying you. You must deliver it if you want to be able to renew advertisers. And so you really must commit yourself to delivering a number that’s the right number for your market based on a CPM basis. You must deliver value. So if you know you’ve got to deliver value why not just go ahead and say okay; I get it now. I’m going to guarantee it. And even though I’m a little afraid I’m not going to make it, I’m going to know I’ve got to make it in order to deliver the value that the advertiser paid for and deserved.
And the flipside of that is okay; so what if I don’t make it? The answer is you owe them a make-good. You come up with a solution that will help them deliver it. For example, if you’re a Mequoda publisher you sell somebody a guaranteed 100,000 impressions. And your site is delivering and you’ve done your projection and it looks like you’re only going to come up with 75,000 impressions during the period of time in question that the advertiser wanted the impressions. You go to them and you say okay; we’re coming up a little short here. How about if I put you on an email newsletter? Boom; you’ve filled that spot. You’ve delivered the value because the email newsletters have roughly the same value, or if they didn’t you’d do it twice to make it work.
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[question]
What is Integrated content
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Integrated content is generally where an advertiser’s message is integrated with the content in some way either because you created content for them and they wanted to sponsor or because you took existing content you had and you somehow weaved the sponsorship’s message onto those pages in a kind of integrated way. So let’s take travel as an example. Let’s say you had a cruise line and you wanted to propose an integrated content sponsorship and let’s say that cruise line had cruises up the Amazon. You might take some material you had in the past on the Amazon on Amazon Travel or Jungle Cruises and make them a sponsor of existing material you already had. So that’s the most common way to do it is to use existing material you had already.
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[question]
How do you measure impressions on mobile apps ads?
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You’ve got to essentially program into the mobile app some kind of a measurement query that goes back to your server to calculate how many times the thing was opened. The bottom line is that you can measure the number of times that people downloaded the app but then you also need to measure the times that people access and use the app and essentially what you need to program into the app is some kind of a reporting process that sends a message back to someplace where you’re keeping track. Now that particular solution hasn’t been solved on a standardized basis yet, so you’re still needing to sort of build it on a custom basis right now and report on a custom basis. There’s not a system out there that I’m familiar with yet that everybody would be plugging into.
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[question]
You know about any marketing companies that sell sponsorship ads for publishers?
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So I would say go to the National Association of Publishers Representatives website; it’s the
www.napr.org I think. You might have to just Google National Association of Publishers Representatives. There’s probably 100 firms there; some of them are geographically specific. Some of them are kind of subject matter you know specific so there’s going to be B2B specialist and there’s going to be consumer specialists and hopefully you can find at least a place to start that way.
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