Is online ad pricing improving again? One organization thinks so

One of the many casualties of the economic downturn has been online ad pricing, but analysts at an ad optimization company now believe we’ve turned a corner.

Improve Digital/PubMatic has released data which suggests that ad pricing may be on the increase, after record lows in 2008.

Reporting at the beginning of the year, PubMatic reported that Q4 2008 ad pricing was nearly half that of the previous year, yet in every month since the start of this year ad pricing has grown between three and 17 per cent, with a total growth of 35% since December.

This is based on data for the US advertising industry. CEO of Improve Digital, Joëlle Frijters, said the situation wasn’t as clear in the UK and Europe, noting, “It would be too early to speak of any trend in Europe given that the data is still mixed with large eCPM increases as a result of [our] optimisation technology.”

The data was based on analysing the ad price data across over 6,000 web sites, 85% of which were in the US.

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OK, so there’s a lot of raw numbers in this story, and you can prove a lot with statistics. Ask someone else and they’ll probably say we’re still in a dark recession — not much different to the varying reports you’ll get on the health of the economy as a whole.

Hopefully, though, it suggests that publishers will begin to reap higher revenue from advertising, whether that be from direct sales or via the likes of Google AdSense.

It’s far too early to draw an optimistic conclusion from these figures, but hopefully we’re getting closer to that light at the end of the tunnel. How quickly we get there is another matter.