You may have already noticed that there are ads now appearing in my blog. This is part of my effort to explore Internet advertising. According to Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC), Internet advertising revenues reached almost $5.9 billion for the third quarter of 2008, representing an 11 percent increase over the same period in 2007. While double-digit annual growth continues, the quarter-to-quarter curve remains relatively flat compared to recent past performance.
Generally speaking, there are primarily two types of ad revenue: searching marketing and affiliate. I'd like to discuss search marketing or pay-per-click ads in this post, what they are, and how they work for you as an ad publisher.
What is pay-per-click?
An ad publisher is a web site that displays ads initially paid by advertisers. There is typically an agency between publishers and advertisers that mediates ad distribution. Here is how pay-by-click works at the 5,000 feet:
- The advertiser sends in the ads to the agency for distribution.
- The agency distributes the ads to the publisher to display in the web pages.
- The visitor comes to the publishing web site, sees the ads, and clicks on the ad, which leads the visitor to the advertiser's web site.
- The advertiser pay to the agency for the click.
- The agency shares the revenue with the publisher.
Google has two programs: AdWords for advertiser and AdSense for the publisher. AdWords allows advertiser to bid on key words, place ads and manage ad campaigns, while AdSense identifies and provides tools for qualified publishers. You must have already seen ads labeled with "Ads by Google" in many web sites similar to the three boxes in this blog. There are reasons why Google beats Yahoo in display ads revenue and becomes a formidable force in the advertising industry. Google protects its advertisers by emphasizing "quality" of ad display, which is in turned by imposing "relevance" between what the visitor is looking for and what the ad is truly about. The end result of this strategy is better user experience, better satisfaction, and higher click-through-rate (CTR), which is a win-win situation for all parties involved. How is this accomplished?
- Google ensures the high relevance between the key words used by the advertiser and the provided ad content. The higher relevance between the two, the higher chances is the add displayed.
- Google analyzes the content of the publishing site and displays only ads that are highly related.
- There is a strict policy in place for the publisher to help retain integrity of this system. For obvious, a publisher is prohibited to clicked on its own ads served by AdSense.
To apply for your AdSense account, go to Google AdSense. You must have already had your site up and running with certain amount of content prior to submitting your application. My application was rejected twice due to the change of the Project BKO site URL after the submission of the application. Obviously, they can't approve a site that is not accessible - a lesson learned. As far as qualification is concerned, the appropriateness of the content on your web site is far more important than the traffic requirement. Google reviews the content site of every application for AdSense. Once approved, you simply copy the JavaScript text from AdSense and paste it in your web pages. If you are using Blogger, this is as easy as adding and configuring an AdSense widget.
In addition to Google, there are also other players in the pay-by-click advertising industry.
Vibrant Media
Vibrant Media is the leader of in-text advertising and a premier provider of contextual video advertising, giving marketers the opportunity to deliver highly targeted, user-initiated advertisements within the text of Web content. The company works closely with advertisers, agencies and Web publishers to plan, buy, deliver and optimize in-text advertising campaigns. Utilizing superior technology and international distribution, Vibrant Media reaches more than 70 million unique users per month in ten different languages, managing more than four billion words per month for top advertisers such as Sony, Intel, New Line Cinema, Microsoft and Toyota. The company was founded in 2000 and has offices in New York, London, San Francisco, Paris and Hamburg with more than 150 employees. The company's rapid, profitable growth has been recognized by both the Inc. 500 and Deloitte Fast 50 lists.
AdBrite
AdBrite was founded by Philip Kaplan and Gidon Wise in 2002, is headquartered in San Francisco, California and backed by venture capital firms Sequoia Capital, DAG Ventures, and Mitsui Ventures. In addition to in-text ads, AdBrite offers banner and full page ads which I founf intrusive. The banner ads includes pay-per-click (PPC) and placements. The company had a layoff of 40% of its staff in October, 2008 to adjust for the economy downturn. I heard there are places banning sites that use AdBrite due to their full page ads. It is reported that AdBrite is also listed on SpywareBlaster's blacklist. If you use SpywareBlaster, you will have to manually disable the blocking of AdBrite cookies.
Adsonar
Adsonar is part of Platform-A - a company that has incorporated several best-in-class solutions that leverage AOL's premier consumer brands (AIM, Moviefone, MapQuest, TMZ, AOL.com and more), Advertising.com's networks — display, video, affiliate and search marketing — with Third Screen Media's mobile network, Quigo's sponsored listings, TACODA's behavioral targeting, and ADTECH's ad serving, providing advertisers with the ultimate one-stop shop for online advertising. If you have a nice site, you can try to get into Adsonar.com. It's one of the highest paying ad sites on the market. It's one of the ones the Alexa top 1000 sites use.
Canep Media
Founded in 2006, Canep Media is a young network pursuing to provide top of the line advertising services to publishers and advertisers. Canep Media's mission is to connect advertisers and publishers in a manner ensuring both of their success. Advertisers are exposed to an audience that they wish to target while publishers capitalize on their inventory. Canep Media offers publishers and advertisers something that most of today’s large networks cannot, attention. Friendly and effective account managers and customer support representatives combined with industry leading technology makes Canep Media an effective solution to both sides of the advertising equation. What differentiates Canep Media from the rest of the pack is that very single impression served through Canep Media is an auction. The auction-based ad network insures that the ad inventory is sold to the highest bidder, which maximizes the publisher's revenue. With advertisers competing for your traffic, you know your getting the best deal that you can get! It appears to pay as well or better than AdBrite and offers more flexibility.
I've learned a lot from some of those books listed under On-line Advertising at your right; such as, Pay Per Click Search Engine Marketing for Dummies, Google AdSense for Dummies, and Google AdWords for Dummies. You may want to check them out, too.
[Read this post on eHow, Squidoo, and HubPages.]
No comments:
Post a Comment