Yes, The CPM Is Holding Back Online Advertising
from the time-to-get-rid-of-it dept
Last week, Shelby Bonnie, former CEO of CNET wrote a great guest piece for TechCrunch, where he suggested killing off CPM as a measurement for online advertising. I'd go even further, and suggest that the obsession with CPM has seriously harmed online advertising. The key point is the one that Bonnie makes first: if you pay for impressions, you create incentives to get impressions. But impressions, by themselves, are not particularly useful, especially when everyone making those impressions ignores the advertisement itself.We've experienced this first hand. While we do offer some CPM-based advertising on the site, we've made it clear that such display advertising is a waste for most companies. Our audience doesn't pay much attention to it at all. Ad blindness is the rule. Instead, we always suggest to companies who approach us about advertising that they would get a much better and much more valuable bang for their buck by engaging our community via the Insight Community. Doing so isn't strictly "advertising," but it actually gets the attention and engagement of the smart folks who hang around here. And, on top of that, beyond just getting people to see your brand, the company actually gets something of value back -- insightful analysis from our community.
And yet... some of the people we speak to can't even comprehend how getting people to engage is smarter than just pushing annoying banner ads that will get ignored. You can always tell when you're dealing with that sort of person when they start focusing on how to calculate the CPM value of an Insight Community case. They ask how many impressions it will get. These are people who would much rather one million people totally ignore their ad, though it gets loaded in the background somewhere, than have a committed group of targeted individuals actually engaging with the brand. It makes no sense at all, but it's the type of conclusion people come to when they focus so much on CPM. When the CPM rules all, then all you get are impressions -- and there are all sorts of games sites can (and often do) use to boost impressions with totally worthless traffic.
Hopefully advertisers really are waking up to the pointlessness of CPM as a an ad measurement system, and really are interested in exploring true engagement. That would be a huge step forward in taking online marketing and advertising from the level its at today (which is mostly just replicating print advertising, but online) to where it belongs tomorrow: taking real advantage of the interactive nature of the medium.
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Filed Under: advertising, business models, cpm
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and then
What cpm?
:)
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who are all pretty much paying CPM or click rates.
Mike, why not live by the word and drop all the ads on your site? Obviously advertising sucks!
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Re:
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Re:
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What?
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cost this brave new world out
Also, not all products are a good fit for this new kind of advertising/PR. Most people buy only one, perhaps two houses in a lifetime -- do they need an ongoing relationship with a realtor or house-builder that could be facilitated by some kind of web community? What brand of water heater do you have? Would you spend time reading, eg, a blog for a water heater manufacturer if you didn't immediately need, or anticipate needing one?
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Stuck in the stone age
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Your ads are Google's Ads
Google had it right... serve up billions of impressions for FREE and get paid only when someone clicks. (although we all know there are ways to juke that system too)
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Re: Your ads are Google's Ads
Heh. That's not even close to true. Google Adsense represent less than 10% of our ad revenue. Our banner ad inventory is actually sold out right now. People buy. We just wish they'd go with the Insight Community instead -- because they would get a lot more value for it.
But we're not going to turn down companies who just want banner ads. We just know that most of you will ignore them.
So you hope visitors like me click on a Google text link so you can get your $0.80 cents worth from them on a monthly or even quarterly basis.
No, we don't care. We figure almost no one clicks, but it's been an interesting learning experience to see how Google AdSense works.
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Re: Re: Your ads are Google's Ads
I don't see the majority of 3rd party ads on most pages on the net, so cpm and other metrics completely leave me out. I am interested in your insight deal, though, and may even try to participate, if for no other reason than it is "different" than the traditional approach to ads.
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Re: Re: Re: Your ads are Google's Ads
What about it? I don't feel particularly anything towards it. I don't use it, but I assume lots of people do, and I have no problem with that. Why would I have a problem with how people use their own computers?
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CPM should remain a low-cost option until/unless (better) measurements show greater viability. But the best online marketers are going holistic. They're creating coordinated campaigns involving search, social media, display, engagement, digital PR, etc. It's not about one or the other. It's about optimizing each medium for maximum benefit.
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Insight Community and CPM
I can sort of understand that - if I were looking to advertise, and had little knowledge of Techdirt, I would want to make sure that more than like 3 people were going to look at it, and would probably ask the question using the language I was used to dealing with when talking about advertising - CPM.
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Re: Insight Community and CPM
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Re: Re: Insight Community and CPM
Yeah, then I guess I can see how the TIC just looks like so much rambling to you. Enjoy paying $600/hr/person for the formatting.
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Err .. ads ? Where ?
Wonder what happens if I turn adblock off .. nah ..
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CPM advertising - we need more performance models
http://www.cpmadvisors.com/2009/10/16/cpm-cpa-hybrid-performance/
We really need better hybrid performance models in the online ad space. And no, CPC is not it because it can be gamed too easily. I think as you say as a publisher you guys are giving advice to the advertiser on how they can be successful on your site and for that you should be applauded. the revenue model for advertising should also reflect and benefit from both the advertiser and the publisher working together to figure out the best ways/places in which to place ads and make them work.
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CPM
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Post Free Classified Ads
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good cpm network
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Very good CPM paying network
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CPM Network
I’ll be extremely grateful to receive a reply to this. This will help me a lot.
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