iMedia: What can publishers do to make more money out of their ad inventories?
Gilbert Lo is regional media director for Admax Network.Gilbert Lo: Studies show that globally, up to 80 percent of sites' inventories go unsold, so the first priority for publishers is how to better sell their own inventory. How can they do this? By differentiating; by making sure their value proposition is clear and attractive to advertisers; by ensuring that they really know and understand their audience; and by finding ways to invest in their site to drive better innovation, execution, targeting, and performance.
For example, improving the site's layout could yield improved audience engagement with ads, resulting in better performance; another could be ensuring that their content is fresh and relevant. If they have good content that is attracting an engaged audience, and they can measure that audience, it makes it much easier to present that entire package to an advertiser and say, this is what is unique about my site, and this is why you should buy.
However, in spite of these efforts by publishers, there's always going to be some amount of inventory that will be very difficult for publishers to sell by themselves, and that's where ad networks come into play. If the inventory is already out there, and it's being consumed by the audience, then there's value to it. The purpose of an ad network is to extract that value and give it back to the publisher. Working with an ad network allows them to monetize that unsold inventory.
Admax, like most ad networks, wants to do it at rates and in ways that make sense to the publisher, but of course must also be competitive in the market. Generally we believe that providing publishers a combination of CPM/branding and performance campaigns results in a good mix for them to achieve high sell-through-rates as well as attractive revenues per CPM (rCPM).
iMedia: How can a publisher make money from a performance ad network?
Lo: We recently launched Boost, our performance network. So for us, we sell cost-per-click (CPC) campaigns for Boost, meaning an advertiser would pay just for actual clicks. If the publisher accepts that campaign, they will get paid for every click that's driven from their site.
Our technology allows us to optimise the campaign to deliver more impressions to the sites that are delivering more clicks. If your site is delivering a high click-through-rate, you get more impressions, and that means more revenue. If your site for some reason is not delivering very high clicks, then we don't deliver as many impressions because it's not a productive use of your inventory. Boost also focuses on quality advertisers and gives publishers full control over what campaigns are run over their site, which differs from most other performance networks.
iMedia: How does syndication fit in with all this?
Lo: Syndication is important to a publisher for two reasons. First, it allows them to get quality content easily and cheaply. If you're a publisher and every day or week you're trying to keep your site updated, this helps you by bringing in that content, and not having to develop it yourself. That makes your website more sticky and attractive. Syndication also allows other sources of monetization if you have good content. You can syndicate it out and get more people to your site, driving more engaged users and ad impressions.
iMedia: What's the next big thing when it comes to ad networks and publishers in 2010?
Lo: Let me focus more on Southeast Asia. If you let the trends in the US play out in Southeast Asia, you're going to see more ad networks come into all markets. It's already happened in Singapore. Singapore two years ago had two or three networks; now there are about six well-established ones. There's going to be more competition for ad networks, and that is good news for publishers because they will be able to have a greater choice of networks and more monetization possibilities, and that should lead to higher CPMs.
More players help us too. We're all trying to grow the market from its current infancy stage. When there are more networks, it probably means more online ad spending, and that makes everyone happy.
Another trend is more sophistication around targeting. Many networks now operate on what we call content-based channels, such as business or travel channels. I see one major shift being towards audience-based channels. Instead of an advertiser trying to reach a particular audience indirectly through a specific kind of content channel, they can now reach them directly.
What Admax is doing in this regard is gathering and mining more data on our inventory, and that will allow us to put together audience channels to make it much easier for advertisers to reach the people they are targeting.
For example, we launched Her Network a number of months ago. It is a women-focused network comprised of hand-selected publishers that have a survey-proven very strong skew towards the 22-plus women's audience. We know that advertisers relish getting access to these women. Previously, they might have to access them by buying women's sites, or maybe celebrity or health and fitness ones, but these are more proxies for the audience that they want. What we want to do is create channels that allow advertisers to directly access their desired audiences.
Marcel Lee Pereira is editor of iMedia Connection Asia.
