Gamers: make your
advertisers proud

Overall monetization in the online ad industry dropped by 0.7 percent from last month, following a 23 percent drop from the previous month.

But social networking and gaming sites have begun to improve: eCPMs increased by 66 and 51 percent, respectively, according to the PubMatic Ad Price Index, a bimonthly report of online ad network pricing for publishers.

Monetization for sports sites remained level in May; entertainment, news and tech sites dropped by 11, 13 and 22 percent, respectively.

Among small, medium and large sites, the large ones — which enjoy 100 million pageviews per month — improved most: 16 percent in April (from 18 to 21 cents). PubMatic attributes this to the spikes in social network and gaming ad pricing.

Medium-sized sites — 1 million to 100 million pageviews/month — remained level, changing less than one percent. Small sites, with less than 1 million pageviews/month, fell 12 percent from March to April.

Other findings:

• Site monetization typically decreased by less than one percent — from 38 cents in April to 37 cents in May. (This data reflects net publisher monetization from ad networks, excluding ad share of ad spends, and inventory sold directly by publishers to agencies or advertisers.)
• Of the vertical sites, social networking increased most: monetization climbed 66 percent, from 19 cents in April to 32 cents in May, just below the vertical's peak of 34 cents in March.
• Gaming monetization increased by 51 percent, from 66 cents in April to $1.00 in May.
• Entertainment monetization dropped 11 percent from 33 cents in April to 29 cents in May; while news sites dropped 13 percent, from $1.30 in April to $1.10 in May.
• Tech sites fell further still: from 83 cents in April to 65 cents in May.
• Niche sites, averaging $1.13 eCPMs, fared better than medium and large ones, averaging 33 and 21 cents, respectively. Monetization of smaller sites fell slightly from $1.29 in April; larger sites increased by 16 percent from 18 cents in April, indicating that some advertisers may be shifting budgets to take advantage of the lower prices on larger sites, PubMatic said.

"While social networking and gaming sites did show some increase in monetization, the two verticals remain volatile and continue to monetize at lower rates than other, smaller verticals," warned cofounder Rajeev Goel PubMatic at the New York OMMA publishers conference.

About the data: The PubMatic AdPrice Index is based on data from over 3,500 publishers and billions of ad impressions.

Today's data is third in a series of monthly releases of the PubMatic AdPrice Index. View the complete June 2008 edition at the Ad Price Index website.