The banner-oriented online media folks have just begun to notice a strange phenomenon: very little remnant banner inventory is available. Remnant media were the opportunistic swathes of inventory that buyers were once able to pick up on the cheap because sites had failed to sell it close to run time. Instead of holding media fire sales, publishers are now employing contextual ad technologies, like Google, overture, Sprinks, FindWhat and others to get a better return on their unsold media.
These content and context advertising issues will be further fleshed out in San Jose next week at the SearchEngineStrategies conference.
Media buyers and sellers specializing in remnant space are in trouble. They won't be seeing much remnant space again, at least not at the exploitative discounts once common. Advertisers may even find it harder to negotiate cost-per-action or hybrid deals with publishers.
Related Posts:
Read more of this analysis below…
These days a lot of remnant inventory is getting piped through Google's AdSense. Effective CPMs to the publisher probably exceed the prices that remnant space used to command. If the site is large, then the folks at Overture want in with Content Match, and Sprinks wants to get into the act too. What used to sell as remnant space now gets targeted against more than 100,000 keyword advertisers.
Continuing the trend, it seems that the price-per click-search engine marketing industry is slowly but surely merging with the rest of the online media industry. The question is, for non-premium inventory that lies between the very best but not quite remnant inventory, can a sales rep do a better job of yield management than Google or Overture. I'm betting on keyword targeting and automated yield management.
Premium inventory on the other hand will always be sold at the highest CPM based on a site-by-site basis, when the sites are large enough to justify a sales team that can sell inventory based on unique media value.
email this story «
