My account management team and I have spent a lot of time talking to publishers large and small, and this is what they are telling us what they want from ad networks.

Smaller Publishers

First and foremost, smaller publishers want more money, the current crunch notwithstanding. Second, they are tired of getting treated like second-class citizens by certain exclusive ad networks.  Just because they have less traffic doesn’t mean it’s not valuable traffic.  Third, they want to be paid on time, within 30 days–a lot of ad networks have lousy payment reliability.  Finally, they want transparency, especially when it comes to AdSense. Publishers have long thought their margin was being squeezed when Google needed to improve its numbers.

Large Publishers

Large publishers want better-quality ads.  They are trying to build a brand and are concerned about the flashy, poor-quality ads that reflect poorly on their site.  They’ll even take less money to get good brands with high-quality ads.  Staff and resources are getting tighter and they are quite frustrated with the fluctuations and the calls from ad networks to respond to their requests for impressions.  They want consistency and guaranteed CPMs.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 10th, 2009 at 12:20 pm 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.