Thanks!

We should reflect on the ad unit sizes and clickthrough rates from another perspective, too.

When we get the statistics of a 0.37 % click through rate of the so-called best performing ad size that means that 99.63% of all visitors have had to ‘live with’ the add on the webpage without having any benefit from it (exactly like the webmaster!).

Everybody who has been involved in the commercializing of the traffic on web pages for a longer time will remember how banner ads lost their value – the surfers simply learned to avoid seeing the banner ads. Many more or less smart applications have been developed to avoid that mechanism to be able still to catch the attention of the visitor. This is obvious a kind of intrusion or disturbance of the visitor to the webpage.

The textural ads pioneered by Google’s Adsense have been thriving on its added value to the visitor by adding relevant links to the site. But probably because many marketers have misused this basic mechanism to lure the visitors to click on the text adds, we are all becoming more blind towards such ads.

This is clearly documented in the immense differences of the click through rate of Adsense on different websites. As I see it, the more relevant adds the website is offering the higher a click through rate will be the result.

The conclusion of these mechanisms would be that it is much more important for the webmaster as well as for the visitor to have ad units that are serving as close as possible the need of the visitors. The more added value the ads are signaling the fewer visitors will avoid clicking on the adds and the fewer will react toward the adds as a disturbance to the content of the website.

The problem might be that it can be difficult to have Google serve the most relevant Adsense offers related to each post on a blog, as the identification of the blog content might not be enough specific to the individual blog post e.g. of a WordPress blog but the identification to the content is more or less based on the whole blog’s content, or at least on all the posts that appear on the front page of the blog.

I think these observations are important too when we discuss “Is Web 2.0 rewarding poor quality?“ see http://blog.yieldbuild.com/2008/09/23/is-web-20-rewarding-poor-quality/

To your success.
Soren from Island Vacation Tips

I’m wondering, to your final point, though, if niche ad networks, which have considerably higher standards for quality than do networks like AdSense and YPN, but also command much higher CPMs, provides an incentive for publishers to produce quality content.

Point 3 is true, but not enough to make a difference next 1-2 years, which is my core argument - and I suspect it will decline or at least fail to grow as fast as forecast following the last few weeks.

As to quality, that thesis ain’t mine, its much older than me :). Many economists have noted that in markets where you can’t extraxt premiums for quality the low cost goods drive out higher cost but better quality ones.