We’re excited to announce that YieldBuild is launching the Premium Text Ad Program today, which includes access for qualifying publishers to Microsoft’s new contextual ad service, pubCenter (adCenter Publisher). The Premium Text Ad Program draws on high-quality, high-performance text ad sources, and complements AdSense or other text or display ad networks that you might be running on your site.
Microsoft pubCenter is currently in beta and not broadly available to interested publishers. However, YieldBuild can get qualifying publishers running Premium Text Ad Program ads including pubCenter today; both current and new YieldBuild publishers are eligible.
Why run Premium Text Ad Program ads alongside your AdSense? You might have read TechCrunch’s article on early results among private beta publishers that expressed performance significantly better than AdSense and Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN)—that has certainly been the case in our early tests as well. In addition to performing well, the ads are attractive and demonstrate excellent contextual breadth.
We look forward to bringing pubCenter to our Premium Text Ad Program participants!
Not a YieldBuild publisher?Sign up and opt in to the Premium Text Ad Program when setting up.
Current YieldBuild publisher? Just go to your Account > Networks page and click the button to start.
How large are the US & worldwide display ad market? First, let’s limit the view to display banner ads only, not including related rich media, digital video or sponsorship advertising (which last week’s IAB/PwC included under its display advertising umbrella. This more limited definition of display advertising comprises approximately 21% of the overall online advertising market in the United States.
US Display Market
Like the projections we came up with a couple of weeks ago for the contextual advertising market, we begin with eMarketer’s projections in November of 2008 for years 2008-2012. How accurate were they with respect to 2008? Pretty close to the IAB/PwC number, actually. eMarketer projected $4.63 billion, while the IAB/PwC study estimate turned out $4.68 billion, a difference of about 1%.
Some could plausibly claim the 2008 estimate is overly optimistic, being a positive number (!), although it’s not entirely unrealistic if we expect a mid-year cessation to the turndown and a resumption of reasonably healthy growth. If you believe, as I do, that any downturn is attributable to the temporary economic weakness and not an intrinsic defect in display advertising, then any shortfall in 2009 might be recouped fully in the following years.
Global Display Market
For the worldwide picture, we start with IDC’s market estimates, apply an approximate 20% of that figure attributable to display, and apply similar growth figures as those expected for the US:
A study by Pricewaterhouse Coopers on behalf of the IAB shows a drop in the until-recently heady growth rates in online advertising. 2008’s 10.6% growth pales compared to 2007’s growth of 26%, and portends even lower (or negative?) numbers for 2009.
A breakdown by formats:
The total market hit $23.4 billion in 2008, as previously mentioned a 10.6% increase over 2007’s $21.2 billion
Search (including contextual) still dominates, with 46% of the market by Q4 2008; its share is equal to approx $10.5 billion annually. Search amounted to 42% of the online advertising market in Q4 2007.
Display accounted for about $7.6 billion in 2008, or 33% of the overall mix. Q4’s $2.0 billion estimate represents a 4.3% decrease below Q4 in 2007.
Performance-based advertising (CPC, CPA, CPL, etc) continued to outpace CPM advertising, comprising 57% vs 39% in 2008. In 2007, performance-based stood at 51% vs CPM’s 46%.
Overall, not too surprising. We’ve long expected that performance-based online ads, in their various forms, would weather the spending downturn far better that CPM-based ads, primarily display.\
eMarketer, in response to the results to the study and a possible admission that it overestimated the market (twice) for 2008, cut its growth predictions for 2009 in half, from 8.9% and $25.7 billion to 4.5% and $24.5 billion.
Ad:Tech, the worldwide digital advertising conference series, is this year launching its first ADSPACE conference and expo in San Francisco, dedicated to contextual advertising for small to medium-sized publishers. The one-day event will focus on making the most out of AdSense and leveraging similar advertising networks to make the most money possible for online advertisers, particularly when the main alternative–display advertising–is faring poorly.
It should come as no surprise, then, that YieldBuild’s very own Paul Edmondson will be a panelist for one of the conference sessions: The State of Contextual Advertising. Joined by 3 other panelists, including Kevin McCabe, senior product manager for Microsoft’s new AdSense challenger, pubCenter, Paul will discuss the current state of the contextual ad market, the major players in the space, trends, and challenges faced both by advertisers and publishers.
Should be a terrific show, coinciding with the standard-bearing event in the industry.
Click on the ad to the right, and use the promotional code ADSPACEC to get a 20% discount off your ticket!
A study by Lightspeed Research and IAB UK surveyed Web users across a broad age range, and the results are interesting.
Across all ages, the most important attributes in grabbing attention are, in order:
relevant
useful
offering a discount
Younger visitors (18-35) are more interested in:
special offers (free or discounted)
entertainment value
exclusive information or invitations
Older visitors (45-54), on the other hand, are drawn to:
relevant
useful
(Freebies might be interesting, too, while the economy is in the doldrums.)
As for formats, all age groups said that they were both familiar with and have clicked on display, text, search, and email ads. Search and contextual ads were cited by all age groups as the most enticing.
In terms of other formats, younger respondents (18-24) liked Facebook and other social media advertising, including virtual gifts and widgets–29% in this age group had interacted with social media ads–while 34% of slightly older respondents (25-34) said that they had clicked on email ads.
ValueClick Media, who’s in the (currently) unenviable position of trying to move display inventory, has released a new banner technology that has the ability to target site visitors by demographics, context and browsing behavior (through its Precision Retargeting product).
Advertisers provide ValueClick with an XML feed with micro-targeting data which is used by ValueClick to serve up customized ads that assemble, presumably, relevant creative, messaging and landing pages for each visitor. The accuracy of the targeting depends on how granular the data is that the advertiser provides, and it obviates the need to create multiple iterations of each creative for various targeted segments. BT comes through ValueClick’s impressive reach–about 83% according to ComScore.
ValueClick seems to have taken a page out of the book of ad creative optimizers like Personiva, Tumri and SnapAds, who have given advertisers the tools to integrate ad creatives and messaging with targeting data to boost response rates.
Tax preparer TaxBrain is one of the first clients using this new product.
As part of its fifth annual Demo Fest, Microsoft’s adCenter Labs showed reporters four new ad technology concepts. While not revolutionary, they demonstrate an interest by the company to both continue innovating in advertising formats, and gather data about what sorts of formats resonate with site users and which don’t.
The four products demoed:
Microsoft Gaze: a contextual in-text widget. Embeddable script can create a pop-up widget window when site visitors hover over selected keywords. The window can host video, images, snippets of related Web pages, maps and, naturally, Microsoft advertisements.
Search behavior-targeted gift matcher: Based on data culled from its own Live Search and opted-in user profile information from its email and Live ID (demographics, primarily), a gift search service can take an intended recipients age, gender and interests, and serve up surprising present recommendations. (If, for example, heavy Beyonce searching correlates strongly with searches on green tea, then maybe a green tea gift bag would be served up)
Creative Creator: Allows smaller advertisers to generate display advertising using creative integration tools. Someone without a creative team or even Photoshop can put together a simple banner.
Location search inferrer: This search technology determines if a search is likely to be intended for local search (like “doctor” or “chinese restaurants”) so that relevant local advertising and search results can be served up (as opposed to a search term like “james bond” which has no locality relevance). However, a search for “san francisco chinese restaurants” when the searcher is in Milwaukee might serve up travel-related results.
Testing contextual, search-behavior, and location-based technologies for advertising is particularly telling given Microsoft’s recent beta launch for its adCenter Publisher (pubCenter) contextual ad service, which has been gathering buzz based on its perfomance compared to AdSense among its private beta users.
How big is the contextual ad market? I’ve turned to a few sources, made a few assumptions, and came up with the following numbers:
First, we begin with eMarketer’s projections from February 2009, which are admittedly a bit rosy. (Keep in mind that we’re generally optimistic with respect to contextual advertising as well, even during the current rough patch) These figures are for the U.S. only:
This works out so that contextual advertising comprises about 20% of the search advertising market, and about 9% of the total online advertising market overall.
Worldwide figures are not available, so I’ve taken estimates of the total online advertising and search advertising markets from IDC’s 2008 study and applied the same percentages for contextual advertising’s share, as well as the same growth rate for contextual advertising. This yields the following for the total worldwide market (I’ve taken off a significant figure from eMarketer’s U.S. projections):
Urbanspoon, a restaurant discovery iPhone app, is one of two apps testing a new format of Google advertising. Clicking on an ad takes you to a page within the app about the advertiser, including a link to their Website. No word on how conversions are tracked and priced (just the in-app landing page, or a click out?). Google already advertises in mobile browsers; this is just their first foray at helping mobile app developers monetize via ads.
The WSJ reports that Google and agency holding company WPP are funding a 3-year, $4.6 million research program that will probe the effectiveness of advertising in driving consumer action in both traditional and digital media. Why? Transaction-oriented advertisers (read: the long tail) have been sold on AdWords’ ability to deliver sales and track performance, brand advertisers (read: the big spenders) have been less interested, preferring generally to send the lion’s share of their budgets to broadcast media even though its impact is unknown. Research demonstrating online advertising’s impact on purchase should help marketers know the devil they currently don’t.
Here’s some data from Q3 2006 through Q4 of 2008 detailing Google’s AdSense revenues, payout and net profit.
TAC = Traffic Acquisition Costs. This is primarily what Google pays out to its AdSense publishers.
The figures below only refer to the portion of TAC dealing with AdSense payout. For instance, Q4 2008’s total TAC was $1.48 billion (which includes payment to distribution and traffic-driving partners, in addition to AdSense payout).
Q3 2006: $0.78 billion
Q4 2006: $0.92 billion
Q1 2007: $1.05 billion
Q2 2007: $1.06 billion
Q3 2007: $1.12 billion
Q4 2007: $1.31 billion
Q1 2008: $1.34 billion
Q2 2008: $1.32 billion
Q3 2008: $1.33 billion
Q4 2008: $1.29 billion
There’s always a discussion as AdSense payouts fluctuate whether Google is putting the squeeze on its publishers and extracting more of the advertiser revenue collected. It’s not clear how much Google is really able to fine-tune the dials to make its quarterly earning call numbers seem more impressive, but the picture can be mixed. In the second quarter of 2008, for example, 2/3 of a drop in total revenue was borne by publishers and 1/3 by Google, while a slight fourth-quarter uptick in revenue ($10 million approx.) resulting in a drop of $40 million in publisher payout and a $50 million increase to Google’s topline. Naturally, this is the same quarter when advertising revenue starting tanking against all rosy expectations earlier in the year.
We’re excited to announce that YieldBuild is launching the Premium Text Ad Program today, which includes access for qualifying publishers to Microsoft’s new contextual ad service, pubCenter (adCenter Publisher). The Premium Text Ad Program draws on high-quality, high-performance text ad sources, and complements AdSense or other text or display ad networks that you might be running on your site.
Microsoft pubCenter is currently in beta and not broadly available to interested publishers. However, YieldBuild can get qualifying publishers running Premium Text Ad Program ads including pubCenter today; both current and new YieldBuild publishers are eligible.
A 
A study by Lightspeed Research and IAB UK 
ValueClick Media, who’s in the (currently) unenviable position of trying to move display inventory, has 
As part of its fifth annual Demo Fest, Microsoft’s 
