Web Publishers Get Sophisticated to Attract Advertisers

Publish a web site; make money in advertising — great business model, right? Maybe in 1999, but since the days of the dot com bust, this model is certainly not for the light-hearted (or under-funded). To really make money at web publishing and attract serious advertisers, publishers have had to get creative…and respond to the demands of major advertisers who are used to completely different means of buying and measuring advertising. How have they responded? Let’s take a look at some of the solutions presented by the Web’s more successful publishers.

Dayparts

A daypart session, which is sometimes called a site session, is when a single advertiser dominates all major ad positions on a publisher’s web site for a pre-determined time of day. The format was borrowed from the television and radio advertising worlds. Currently, five dayparts are in effect for the Internet: early morning, daytime, evening, late night, and weekends, with daytime being the largest daypart (measured in total audience and total usage minutes) according to a February 2003 study done by the Online Publishers Association. Both evenings and weekends follow in rank. The New York Times Online was the one of the first to implement the concept in June 2002 with American Airlines being its initial advertiser. Now other publishers like Yahoo and CBS MarketWatch use the same tool.

Dayparts advertising is effective for both brand advertisers and those advertisers seeking a direct response. Brand advertisers like McDonald’s have tested daypart advertising to promote their breakfast sandwichs during morning dayparts, and Budweiser placed ads on CBSMarketWatch during happy hour.

Surround Sessions

A surround session is one in which a site visitor’s session is dominated almost exclusively by one advertiser. It employs sequential advertising, which is when an advertiser controls the portrayal of their brand in a sequential manner over several pages, ultimately leading to generating a response on the last page. Because of this domination and ad control, as well as improving audience reach and frequency, surround sessions are very expensive advertising options. The New York Times fathered this ad buy, but now other publishers like Boston.com uses it.

Brand Increase Guarantees

Guarantee — it’s a pretty powerful word. If you had a guarantee on your ad placement with Forbes.com, would you turn it down? Well, that’s exactly what Forbes.com is offering with its Brand Advertising Effectiveness Guarantee program. Forbes.com insists that if you do not see a “statistically significant increase in one of four Dynamic Logic measured brand metrics” your money will be returned. Of course, there is a hitch: the advertiser must agree to spend $150,000 over 60 days before Forbes.com will even talk to them about their program, but it’s an intriguing way of pitching an ad buy.

Using patent pending AdIndex Brand Metrics Research technology, Forbes.com measures aided brand awareness, message association, brand favorability, and purchase consideration.

Publisher Friendly Advertising Options

In most cases, the time put into selling one’s site to advertisers, contracting, updating creatives, and scheduling may be a bit too much to handle for a small web publisher (or even a large one). If the inhouse advertisement selling is not working as planned, here are some quick programs which should fill the void while the phones aren’t ringing off the hook;

• Google AdSense - Google’s Adsense program allows approved websites to dynamically serve Google’s pay-per-click Adword results. The AdSense ads shown use contextual targeting technology which, in most cases, serves Google text ads which are relevant to the content of your website. In many cases, AdSense has been a godsend for web publishers who are not privately selling many ads or can bring in more revenue than traditional web advertisements.
• FastClick - FastClick is an advertising network which serves multiple types of graphical ads on websites. Although the ads displayed via FastClick are not targeted to vertical industries and moreover to a broad online audience, FastClick optimizes their ads served by performance on a publisher’s site, can pay out by ad impression, and even wires revenue directly to PayPal accounts.
• phpAdsNew - phpAdsNew is an open source total ad serving, tracking, and campaign management. It’s open source, so phpAdsNew is free and has can handle the serving of banner, popup, text, flash and DHTML advertisements. They even have geotargeting and dayparting options for adding more beef to your advertisement offerings and competing with large publishers.
• AdRevenue - W3MATTER’s AdRevenue is an ad serving solution similar to phpAdsNew except for it is not open source and must be paid for. However, there is one feature that may make it worth shelling out the $99 for this product - the ability to function as a “self-serve” advertising solution where advertisers can sign up, create or upload an ad, pay for it and have the revenue transfered to your credit card gateway or PayPal account, and then advertisers can log in to track the performance of their ads. Besides the actual selling, AdRevenue actually handles the entire buying and contracting process, saving publishers both time and headaches.

Obviously, brand name web publishers have the power and technology to offer sophisticated advertising solutions than do smaller publishers, but no one has the market cornered on innovation and opportunities exist for all web publishers. Advertisers will buy if they see (and can prove) value in advertising on your site. If you’re a web publisher, we encourage you not to just do what you’ve always done when it comes to advertising placements. Look at what the buying market responds to and be innovative instead of reactive.

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