The Online Publishers Association (OPA) released the results of a study today as a followup to another study (full PDF) published six months ago that found ads performed better (higher impact on brand favorability and purchase intent) on branded content sites than on portals (content aggregators) and other types of Websites. The study used data from Dynamic Logic’s MarketNorms database.

The recent study took a look at 47 different performance metrics  on original-content sites vs portals, social networks and other types of sites, and found that despite the recent economic downturn, advertising on the former continues to outperform the rest. Original content sites generally have a strong advantage at attracting traffic because of their unique product offerings, but, it seems, advertisers benefit from the association.

Here are a few data points, comparing original-content sites with other site types:

• aided brand awareness: original-content +38%, ad networks -19%, over the past six months
• brand favorability: original-content +27%, ad networks and portals showed double-digit percentage declines over the same time period. This was particularly the case for younger (18-34) and more affluent ($75k+) Web audiences.

Why? We can speculate that higher-quality sites demand more respect, however subconscious, among Web viewers, and brands associated with them are more likely to enjoy a halo effect, enjoying an implicit endorsement from the sites. This might provide some comfort to original-content publishers smarting from seeing value bleed to portals and aggregators through behavioral targeting.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 8th, 2009 at 11:41 am and is filed under Online Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.