Google Great at Monetizing Crap
I had lunch with the co-founders of an ad network startup on Thursday. I will keep their identities anonymous, but I cannot help quoting one of them, as he put his finger on one of the biggest problems plaguing Google AdSense: It is great at monetizing crap, but offers absolutely no premium for high quality traffic.
I have said before, that I am giving up on AdSense, and suggested how Yahoo could kill AdSense. The problem, however, is that the rest of the eco-system isn’t ready yet, and no one has yet come up with a compelling, scalable, vertically-oriented ad network that does justice to high quality traffic and superior content, by tapping into the brand advertising budgets available from major advertisers.
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* First Quarter U.S. Internet Display Ad spending hit $2.7 billion–a 16.7% increase over the same period last year, acc. to TNS Media Intelligence.
* Financial services was the leading category, with spending of $488.7 million on Internet advertising for the period–up 51.2% over 2006.
* The top 10 Internet display advertisers are IAC, Verizon, Experian, eTrade, Apollo Group, Netflix, Scottrade, AT&T, FMR Corp. and National Amusements.
* Top 10 segments are Financial Services, Retail, Internet, Misc. Services, Media, Telecom, Computer Products, Travel & Tourism, Education, and Auto.
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So where is the scalable vertical ad network for Business and Finance? For Travel & Tourism? For Consumer Electronics? For Lifestyle Products? For Auto?
No prizes for guessing which company is the most strongly positioned to pull this one off. Yahoo, the slumbering Yahoo. But ofcourse, as it takes its own sweet time, even old media giants like Time Warner may get their acts together ahead of the sleeping beauty!
I think in near future the Ads, on Publisher’s site, will become on stop buying instead of clicking on the ad and landing on the advertisers site. Its Just like buying Recharge Currency Card for Mobile in any shop instead.
Also, there is no facilities to include ads that we want on our site/blog because we know our blog readers/target audience better than those providing ads like Adsense or AdCentre.
For eg: Take this blog only, only high profile bloggers, passionate techies and bizz people visit this blog. If sramana is given authentication to include ads on her blog whats she wants, then she knows better about her target audience then those of companies providing ads.
The ads [adsense] currently served on this page for the current topic is completely irrelevant to the context and no one click on the ads and visit the site.
I think behavioral target advertising is the next thing.
Sramana, I agree with your comments. One consistent frustration we hear from smaller publishers who are producing thoughtful, high value content is that they don’t have a way to attract high CPM brand advertising that is contextually relevant to their readers.
Fortunately, this is early days and some great ideas are emerging on how to connect brand advertisers with publishers across the fragmented web to create mutually beneficial and sustainable relationships. At Adify, we think vertical ad networks will play a role in addressing this challenge and we’re doing our best to make it as easy as possible for new vertical networks to be created across many of the categories you suggest. As with most transformative shifts, It will take some time, but rest assured, we’re hard at work.
Keep the good ideas coming!
Sramana,
I miss the opportunity to http://www.gettailgate.com/en/index.html which i mentioned in the above first comment first para: “I think in near future the Ads, on Publisher’s site, will become one stop buying instead of clicking on the ad and landing on the advertisers site.”. That is what gettailgate do. I imagined that 3 months back but failed execution.
[…] Google Great at Monetizing Crap […]
[…] Google also completed their acquisition of DoubleClick which will allow them to offer a more comprehensive solution for advertisers and publishers. Using DoubleClick’s display ad management products and Google’s ad network, they are expecting to be able to help publishers get more revenue while they put forward a richer content. Despite all that, AdSense continues to grow at a marginal growth rate of 3% per quarter. This slow growth is also derivative of the fact that AdSense still does not monetize the social networks it pushes ads to. Like I said before, AdSense is great at monetizing crap. […]