Happy New Year to all! It’s going to be a very exciting and productive 2010 from all that we have seen already and we look forward to working with new clients, supply- and demand partners. If any of you are going to be at Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas, let us know (apparently it is now sold out). We’ll have a small group of folks there, so contact us if you would like to set up a meeting.
A couple of members of the CPMa team who will be there:
Charlie Lambropoulos (left), who is a new member of our team, working on partner development having just joined us from The Rubicon Project where he was the manager of ad network development. Charlie used to play soccer at Colgate, though he sometimes likes to call it football. He’s also hoping to find some World Cup 2010 tickets and a cheap flight to Cape Town, he tells us.
Kirk Bardin (right), our business development/sales manager who hails from Southern California. When you meet Kirk, in addition to display optimization, ask him about the Spartans. Or about Pac-10 Football. As usual, there’s a lot of great stuff going on behind the scenes as we continue to build out more features in our CPMatic.com platform and continue to grow the sales, business development and account management teams here at CPMa. Stay tuned.
We read about the unfortunate compromise of user passwords at RockYou.
As I point out in a comment there, research I did at Jupiter (now Forrester) and presented to the FTC several years ago showed that over 53% of users used the same password and username at substantially all the sites they visit. I think the real number is probably still pretty high, despite companies doing a lot to force people to choose better passwords – because there are so many more sites and services that require account creation.
For people interested in just playing around with the figures in this simple example themselves, here is a spreadsheet you can input your own values: Excel 2007 Spreadsheet
We would certainly welcome comments and thoughts: there is a lot of real value that is and will be created here, but there needs to be further thought given to how it will all hang together.
As we at CPMa have done before, we collected from Facebook their self-reported user figures by country this weekend, and then compared it to the figures we found back in April 2009. In the space of 7 months, Facebook has grown by 71% to 326,915,060 users across 98 countries. The numbers are astounding when you consider this means almost 6 percent of the world is on Facebook, with 46 of the 98 countries having over 1 million users each, 16 with 5 million users or more and 7 with 10 million or more. Facebook’s US audience is now approaching 100 million, showing up as 97,178,980 this November 28th, 2009. BTW Facebook’s unique user counts for October 2009 according to comScore myMetrix are 97,372,000 unique users – who each visit 23.6 times per month and spend 7.8 minutes per visit or just over 3 hours per month.
The US remains the largest country by Facebook audience by some distance, and with 63% growth since April it has moved up to being the 12th most penetrated country in the list, behind the Dominican Republic, Iceland, Norway, Canada, Denmark, Singapore, Hong Kong, UK, Chile, Australia, and Sweden still ahead of it in penetration. If the Facebook figures are in fact unduplicated users (which they almost certainly are not, but it’s likely the duplicate rate is probably no more than 10 percent we’d hazard to guess) this means almost a third of all Americans are on Facebook.
Google has purchased Teracent – and in the news story in the New York Times it gave this description of the company’s market which I thought was funny:
Google has bought a Silicon Valley startup that customizes the online billboards known as display advertising.
Online billboards indeed! This deal was known to be happening fairly broadly, though the acquisition price I had heard rumored was a high one, which seemed too high. Will be great to understand some of the thinking behind the deal, but hard to go wrong with Google probably as an acquirer. Congrats to the Teracent team!
Ad networks and ad servers often provide a choice of tag types to their publishers/users: iframe or javascript. in the case of ad networks or exchanges, sometimes the choice of tags that the publisher uses is up to them and often it is not… however sometimes they nest these ad tags inside of ad servers that in turn use iframes. So an often convoluted series of “frames within frames” persist.
There are various pros and cons of Iframes (see here for a good overview some of which I summarize here), some pros include: Iframes don’t delay the serving of the page, typically loading in parallel with the other page content, there is no chance of name clashes with Javascript variable names if they are inside an iframe.
Some pretty big cons of iframes would include losing the referrer information of the page, which in turn means you can’t do contextual analysis of the page and more importantly you don’t really know where your ad has been running. Ads can’t communicate between each other if they are on the same page, so the coordination for wrap arounds or other things can be lost. You can’t run expandable ads (though some rich media creative companies like OggiFinoggi have come up with ways to “fake” expansion ads with iframes that is kind of interesting), which some users would say is a great benefit of these, but it complicates further the adserving ecosystem adding more heterogeneity to inventory which is now a mix of iframes and javascript tags and it is then unclear what can serve where.
As a demand-side platform helping advertisers buy optimized media, CPM Advisors (CPMa) runs billions of ad impressions per month across various advertising exchanges and we look at a LOT of impression logs. A lot of lower-cost inventory on some of these sources we have seen is hidden behind iframes, meaning most often the referring URL is that of the ad network serving the ads. As a whole, inventory that is served in iframes has a substantially lower price and underlying value than inventory that appears in javascript tags. The extent of the problem on any particular platform including Right Media is unclear, though I would guess that, excluding Yahoo! on the exchange, iframes might be 70 percent by volume if a fair bit less by number of publishers. There are obvious reasons for this, including that companies who would do nefarious things and generate large volumes of traffic often would hide their referring URLs behind iframes (and often, many nested layers of iframes running in parallel), but I do not believe the fairly young ad market yet correctly takes into account this trade-off.
Now there are exceptions. Some publishers like Amazon.com that work with ad networks grudgingly, purposefully put their ads in two layers of iframes to hide their origin AND to stop unscrupulous partners from “stealing” shopper-related data from their pages presumably – but as my other writings would attest I believe that the “sell the same stuff for different prices” world of online publishing will come to an end in the next several years and then this kind of good-quality-site-hiding-behind-frames behavior should be reduced – with the caveat that data use practices in a non-iframe world will also have to be more closely looked at, which I think will happen regardless. Are impressions a commodity? No, not yet but that wouldn’t be a bad thing if we had a real market to buy and sell impressions or “audience”. Let me put it this way – platinum and lead are both commodities but one sells for $1400 an ounce and the other for $1 a pound.
In tomorrow’s market-driven ad world, transparency will be more the norm and anonymous inventory will have its place, but on average will be discounted in price. Thus we may see what one might call the “iframe tax” – less measurability and accountability means more trust is needed which means more risk which means less money for networks and publishers that use them.
CPM Advisors operates the CPMatic.com advertising platform which allows marketers to buy optimized display advertising, and our system now has 94.3% reach (187.1 million monthly uniques) in the United States according to data from comScore (September 2009 dataset).
Google/Doubleclick has this week enabled pixel-based targeting across their exchange, including the Google Content Network, and we are now able to offer brands and partners the ability to instantly do retargeting (also known as remarketing or remessaging) campaigns across a variety of ad platforms including the entire Google Content Network which numbers about 159.7 monthly unique visitors monthly: CPMatic.com offers self-service retargeting which you can setup and be live on within 10 minutes with a credit card.
Audience-targeted retargeting campaigns have a typical 3x to 20x better ROI than regular site-targeted display ads: we think it’s a great way especially for search marketers to get started with display ad buying.
It took a few days of back and forth with the Google folks to make sure the clicktracking macros were set up correctly, our tags and tracking worked in their system and so on, but we are now live and running a real non-test campaign on the Google/Doubleclick Ad Exchange (2.0). The only reason we mention in hear is because we heard that (1) very few networks/buyers have actually deployed campaigns on the platform so far, (2) only a fairly small number of networks have been approved to serve across the entire Google Content Network so far. As with any system we work with or integrate with, we’re hoping to very quickly learn the ins, outs, tricks and best practices to give the benefit thereof to our advertiser clients! It’s an exciting time for the online display advertising industry, and I look forward to seeing all the old faces next week in New York at ad:tech.
Charlie Lambropoulos (left), who is a new member of our team, working on partner development having just joined us from The Rubicon Project where he was the manager of ad network development. Charlie used to play soccer at Colgate, though he sometimes likes to call it football. He’s also hoping to find some World Cup 2010 tickets and a cheap flight to Cape Town, he tells us.
Kirk Bardin (right), our business development/sales manager who hails from Southern California. When you meet Kirk, in addition to display optimization, ask him about the Spartans. Or about Pac-10 Football. As usual, there’s a lot of great stuff going on behind the scenes as we continue to build out more features in our CPMatic.com platform and continue to grow the sales, business development and account management teams here at CPMa. Stay tuned.