Is online ad pricing improving again? One organization thinks so

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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.

ad-cost-graph

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. [Read more…]

Gawker Media is Back to Promoting Pageviews

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Gawker Media has had a good year so far, with ad revenue up 35% when the industry is suffering. The network clocked 334 million pageviews in June, and Nick Denton is happy. He is, in fact, so happy that he’s bringing pageviews to the table again, with bonuses for writers reaching their individual targets. This from an internal memo published on the Nieman Journalism Lab blog.

Don’t all get excited: the levels will be modest; aimed at the writers who aren’t paid as much as their traffic would warrant; and we’re only committing to bonuses for the second half of this year. Chris Batty’s sales and creative services teams have done an impressive job in bucking the advertising slump; but we have no idea how long we can continue to out-perform competitors.

He’s also mentioning the new commenting system and policy change, further outlined in a Jezebel post. Skipping that, the memo actually gives some insight in how Denton & Co. thinks about comments. [Read more…]

Take your brands online and save UK, says British marketer

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“The UK advertising industry sucks £18bn ($29bn) annually from firms to make ads that are increasingly being ignored and deliver no value.”

That’s according to Tim Hunt, MD of UK-based marketing company Flexile.

At a time when companies need to save money, Hunt reckons that they should dump TV, magazine and junk mail advertising and instead embrace the Internet “where buyers now flock to find products and services”.

He has harsh words for ad agencies, claiming that they perpetuate the myth that the Internet is an immature environment. [Read more…]

ReadWriteWeb Does Sponsor Posts

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I was a bit surprised to see that ReadWriteWeb published a sponsor post (about the .me domain, which is cool, check out tdh.me /shameless plug), something I haven’t noticed them doing before. This is how they, well, defend it I guess:

[…] we offer our long-term sponsors the opportunity to write ‘Sponsor Posts’ and tell their story. These posts are clearly marked as written by sponsors, but we also want them to be useful and interesting to our readers. We hope you like the posts and we encourage you to support our sponsors by trying out their products.

Right. I’m not sure I like this kind of sponsored post actually, it is too much marketing. I don’t mind thanking sponsors in posts though, as in “thanks to our sponsors, June 2009” or something like that. This? Too much marketing, but at least RWW are transparent about it.

ProBlogger.net Branches Out, Launches Deal Account On Twitter

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ProBlogger.net is launching a blog deals account on Twitter, to pass out coupon codes, discounts, special offers and more. Darren Rowse explains his decision to launch @ProBloggerDeals on Twitter like this:

I’d love to promote everything on ProBlogger but the reality is that ProBlogger.net is a blog that focuses more upon tips on how to blog rather than a blog about products or tools for bloggers.

It’s an account for promotional tweets only, and some of the links on it will be affiliate ones. Rowse is open about that, naturally, and you should be aware of it too. That being said, when he claims he’ll stick to promotions for good stuff, I tend to believe him. After all, Rowse has a great reputation.

Read more about the account, and follow it on Twitter if you’re into that sort of thing. Personally, I keep thinking how much more open and fair this sounds than Perez Hilton including promotional tweets in his ad campaigns. But maybe I’m biased.

How Do You Get RSS Subscribers To Visit Your Blog?

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Oh look, VentureBeat rebranded itself a bit. I hadn’t noticed, despite glancing through all the updates from this blog on a daily basis. I read it through my RSS reader, and that is a problem for the publisher.

We already deducted that the massive footer ads will get you nowhere, unless you can sell them from a fixed price (don’t accept that, media buyers!). That means that you probably want your RSS readers to pop in on your site every now and then.

How do you get your RSS subscribers to visit your blog? Share in the comments.

Google AdSense pushing local currency reporting for many international publishers

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When I logged into my Google AdSense control panel last night I found a new option to have my earnings listed in local currency (UK pounds) from now on.

This has been developing for some time but it’s the first time I’ve been prompted by Google to change to local currency.

What appears to be new is that, once the change has been made, it’s not possible to change back to US dollars (either reporting or payment method). Before, Google had said that “you can still choose to receive payments in US Dollars”.

Does this make any difference to international publishers? [Read more…]

Six Apart and VideoEgg partner on video ads

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Bloggers using TypePad will find it easier to integrate video ads into their content thanks to a partnership between VideoEgg and Six Apart announced today.

Six Apart will offer AdFrames ad units including Twig, which is an ad that stays in the browser window and can be expanded upon mouse over (one of the types of ad I hate, for what it’s worth).

The press release implies that the video units will be available to all publishers, though I’d be surprised if there was no quality control/bar to entry at all. It mentions that “launch partners” include Orbitcast, MediaBlab, Geeks are Sexy, Make Use of and Blog Net News, so perhaps it is fairly selective. [Read more…]

The Ad Heavy Feed Footers

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It was bound to happen, ads hitting the RSS feeds. It’s not even anything even remotely new, popular services such as Feedburner (pre-Google) offered advertising solutions for your feed, and does now too, thanks to Adsense. Other players in the feed sphere did it too, and don’t forget the publishers themselves – adding something at the end of the RSS feed isn’t even all that hard. And I’m not even mentioning the fact that if you put an ad in your blog post, it’ll go right along in your feed.

It makes sense. A lot of us like to read, or at least glance, stories in the feed reader. We might not visit some sites in weeks, despite being regular readers.

Enters the ads in the RSS feeds. Problem is, where there is plenty of opportunity to make it look splendid and great on a website, the feed doesn’t have the same possibilities. Which makes it ugly. [Read more…]

Perez Hilton To Include Tweets In Ad Campaigns

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BlogAds.com CEO Henry Copeland participated on a panel at the OMMA Publishing, and had some Perez Hilton gossip to share. We’ll skip the “new friendlier site” launch rumors and skip to the part where Copeland says that Hilton has six-figure deals to tweet about products and/or services.

Under the agreements, Hilton this summer will post Tweets about the products or services involved for a week on his Twitter feed, which Copeland said has more than 1 million followers. “Perez is a great springboard for anyone who needs a springboard onto Twitter,” said Copeland, who claims that a link by the notorious blogger can send 10,000 to 20,000 new visitors to a site in an eye blink.

This will be linked to ad campaigns on PerezHilton.com, probably sold as a package. Media buyers love that. MediaPost has the full story.