Posts Tagged ‘ads’
Why Publishers Should Embrace Programmatic Buying
Nov 30th
by mpuentes in Company, Lijit publishers, industry, technology
Those who “own” inventory are concerned that through exchanges, advertisers and trading desks have access to the same premium placements at lower CPMs, thereby diluting direct sales opportunities.
As a premium publisher, you probably invest in a sales team to monetize your inventory. You sell a unique readership, social engagement capabilities, contextual relevance, and other site-specific aspects that help value premium inventory at premium prices. Your team works hard to close direct deals with high CPMs to make sure the value of the inventory is not diluted so they can keep cash in their pockets!
On the other side of the coin is the brand advertiser. Brand advertisers also have concerns about exchanges because they are hyper-sensitive to brand alignment. They work hard to protect their brand from the “Wild West” we call the Internet, and are über-sensitive to the variability of content across the web.
Buying direct from premium publishers ensures contextual relevancy and protects against brand conflict. It’s the safe route that allows a brand advertiser to lock in contextually relevant real estate and track ROI.
A “true” private exchange turns potential dilution of inventory, internal struggles with the sales team, and contextual awareness into a big-time publisher opportunity. In a true private exchange, the sales team continues to work with advertisers to sell premium inventory. Let’s not forget what’s important to advertisers: (1) contextual placement and (2) guaranteed inventory/unique(s).
A “true” private exchange gives priority bidding to the select advertisers that have negotiated a higher mid-tier CPM. The CPM is higher than on an open exchange because it’s backed by data, yet lower than a premium CPM because it’s not guaranteed.
The industry needs to embrace true private exchanges. A “true” private exchange solves a real business problem for both the publisher and advertiser:
(1) Publishers can place inventory on a private exchange at a $3-$10 CPMs and offer it to a “select” set of advertisers
(2) Publishers can use the private exchange to build a process and compensation plan for the sales team
3) Advertisers feel safe using a private exchange that guarantees contextual placement and protects against brand conflict.
The private exchange is a true private marketplace where the prioritized advertiser with the highest bid wins.
Tags: ads, blogging, industry, Lijit Advertising Services | View Comments
How to turn your hobby into a business: lessons learned from Lijit publisher Kurt Kohlstedt
Sep 13th
Longtime Lijit publisher Kurt Kohlstedt is the Founder and Executive Editor of Webist Publishing and Misnamed Media. His collection of sites include WebUrbanist, WebEcoist, Dornob, and Gajitz – which each have their own theme relating to creative, innovative, and sustainable art, architecture, and design.
Kurt is the quintessential mid-size Lijit publisher who has used online advertising to successfully transition his hobby into a business. Read on to learn how Kurt got his start and how he built his business using analytics and online advertising.
How did you get your start in the world of online publishing?
I was finishing my graduate degree in architecture and slowly began to realize that I was equally interested (if not more) in writing about design as I was in becoming an architecture professional. It was at that point I decided to give online publishing a shot as a full-time career. I built an audience by testing out various topics and found a nice balance between what I liked to write about and what people liked to read. I launched my first site, WebUrbanist, in the middle of 2007.
Tags: ads, Lijit Advertising Services, Lijit publishers, lijit stats, publisher spotlight, publishers | View Comments
One of the core pillars at Lijit is a fundamental belief in providing online publishers with “actionable analytics.” We use the term “actionable analytics” to describe the concept of giving publishers access to meaningful, easy-to-understand data that can be used to better engage your readers, grow your website, and make more money. It’s data that publishers can take action on.
This week we are rolling out a brand new, completely revamped weekly stats email that provides publishers with highlights on site performance and other relevant data. Every publisher using Lijit’s tools and services – whether it’s our ad services, analytics, or reader engagement tools (site search, reader widgets, etc.) – receives a weekly email customized to the type of tools and services deployed.
Only interested in ad services? Your weekly email focuses on what you care about – ad performance and revenue. Interested in advertising but still want analytics about your site’s audience? Your email has the best of both worlds because it combines ad performance statistics with audience data to give you a 360 degree view of your site. Layer on top any of our reader engagement tools and you also receive search and reader data to help you learn about your audience and keep them on-site longer. The more tools and services you have, the more data we provide!
The new weekly stats email complements your existing publisher dashboard, which contains more detailed information for publishers to drill down into specifics on ad performance, audience statistics, and search behavior.
Check your inbox this Sunday night and please send us your feedback!
Tags: ads, Lijit publishers, new features, stats | View Comments
The economic rules governing the advertising technology industry can seem a little counterintuitive when referring to pixels and cookies versus physical goods or financial instruments. Further, when it is as easy as installing a snippet of JavaScript on your page to start making money, companies can seem more like pyramid schemes than players in a fundamentally sound market. However, believe it or not, the advertising technology industry is governed by the same economics that govern most every other industry. And supply, demand, price, and quantity are some of the most fundamental economic concepts that can be applied to ad tech with just a little translation.
Ad “inventory” is essentially synonymous with “supply.” This is the available ad space on a website. Thus, publishers are the suppliers of the industry. And the price a publisher is willing to accept varies depending on content, seasonality, audience, location of the ad zone on a page, and many other variables. Considering the way that ad serving works, with an individual advertisement being passed from advertiser to network, to exchange, to SSP, to publisher, etc, this might seem backwards. But the best way to think about it is the way the money flows. Ad “inventory” is available for purchase, just like product inventory in a store or a warehouse.
On the other side is “demand.” “Demand” is essentially advertising spend. “Demand” by advertisers also varies based on seasonality, content, audience, etc. for the same obvious reasons. Where the supply and demand curves meet is the nexus we use to identify “price” and “quantity.” Of course, we, the ad tech industry, have our own word for “price” which is “CPM.” And we express the concept of “quantity” with terms like “ad traffic” and “fill rate.”
Once you boil the industry down to these fundamentals, it seems less populated with buzzwords and more with terms reflective of actual economic opportunity. Terms like “demand side platform,” “supply side platform,” and “ad exchange” make sense despite the fact that they sound more like they come from Wall Street than Silicon Valley or Madison Avenue (or Boulder, Colorado in our case). In fact, these terms are reflective of a healthy and fundamentally sound (although ridiculously dynamic) market with incredible economic opportunity for years to come.
Just take a look at LUMA Partners‘ Display Advertising Technology Landscape to get a sense for the sheer number of companies involved in this highly competitive and fast growing market:
The latest numbers from eMarketer estimate that the US online ad market will see dramatic growth this year with spending to increase 20.2% to $31.3 billion. eMarketer also predicts that by 2015, total US online ad spending will reach $49.5 billion, more than 58% higher than this year’s estimate. Now those are some ad tech economics!
Tags: ads, Lijit ad network, Lijit Advertising Services | View Comments
Today we announced crossing 1B pageviews in a 30-day period. That’s an amazing milestone for us for sure. I have a graph on the wall of my office that Tara printed out after we released Lijit Search back in 2007.
As you can see we were quite excited when we passed 100K pageviews in a single day. I used to say that “pageviews are oxygen” for our business. Today we see about 40M pageviews in a single day and the numbers are accelerating. Although we are announcing 1B pageviews today we actually passed that milestone a few weeks back and the 30-day run rate number is now closer to 1.1B or 1.2B.
Our goal from the beginning was to develop a service that would help publishers make their site better by understanding their readers, creating better content through analytics, and finally, leveraging their unique audiences and data to better monetize their site.
Last year we released Lijit Ad Services for publishers. It started out similarly with a nascent number of ad calls but grew super fast because publishers who were already our partners were quick to adopt the service. Today Lijit serves about 613 ads every second onto one of the 15K sites in our network. Combined, about 90M people a month see a Lijit ad on one of our publisher sites.
I’m really looking forward to 2011. One thing that is always constant in the Lijit universe is that there is always more oxygen!
Tags: ads, Lijit publishers | View Comments
This blog post comes to you courtesy of our amazing Director of Ad Serving, Dave. He loves writing these posts almost as much as he loves me bugging him to write these posts. But not as much as he loves fly-fishing.
This week, Lijit has released the latest version of our ad platform. The two key features for this release are the introduction of commissions that will be paid to publishers for advertiser referrals, and the launch of our closed beta program for ad placement on the content pages of our publishers.
Publisher Commissions
Publishers will earn commissions in two ways for referring advertisers who create keyword search ad campaigns. Direct referrals are made by publishers who send the link found on the “Sell Your Ad Inventory” tab to an advertiser who builds a campaign. Indirect referrals are made when an advertiser clicks on the “Advertise Here” link found on the Lijit Search Results and creates a campaign. In each case, Lijit will pay the referring publisher a commission for each valid click. The amount that publishers earn for clicks on their search results page is unaffected by the commission structure.
Content Page Ad Placement
To provide publishers with additional ways to monetize their sites, we are building upon our existing ad platform to offer publishers the ability to place ads on the content pages of their sites. Publishers will have the ability to choose between placing text ads or image ads on their sites, and what size they want their ads to be.
Publishers will be compensated on a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) basis, meaning that the publisher’s account will be credited based on page views, rather than clicks. Before opening this up to everyone, Lijit is going to run a closed beta program, so that we can gather real feedback from real publishers that we will use to optimize the publisher experience. If you would like to participate in the beta program, please click here.
Please keep an eye out for more information about Lijit’s program for content page ad placement and how you can participate.
Tags: ad selling, ads, Lijit ad network, release announcements | View Comments
Because of publishers like you, Lijit continues to grow in new and exciting directions. We’d like to tell you about our newest one right now: During 2008, Lijit has been developing features that allow advertisers to present your readers with highly targeted ad placements in search results. But that’s not all – we’ve also developed features that allow YOU to share in the revenue from these ad placements!
The beta release of the Lijit Ad Network will be open to advertisers and publishers like you starting October 8th, 2008. In this release, publishers will be able to opt-in to the search-based ad network and begin receiving a share of the revenue for ad units displayed in your search results. As a thank you for your patience while we’ve been developing and testing these features, your account will be pre-loaded with a credit for estimated revenues based on your search history during this period (a minimum of $5).
We’re not done yet! In the near future those publishers who have opted in to Lijit’s Ad Network will be able to sell their search based ads directly to advertisers with whom they may already have relationships, targeting just their own publication and making even more money for themselves. This is going to be big!
To start capturing your share of revenue from the Lijit Ad Network, log in to your Lijit account and at the top right of your profile page, click the “Start Now” button. (If you don’t want to participate in revenue sharing, you certainly don’t have to and can continue using Lijit as you do today. We promise to use your share of the ad revenues wisely.)
Our new publisher FAQ answers all the questions we could think of during development and alpha testing of this cool feature, but if you can think of one we haven’t covered, please email us at support@lijit.com.
We look forward to working together with you to help you monetize your search results. It’s an exciting time to be Lijit and we welcome any feedback you may have. Thanks again!
Tags: ads, events, features, money, press, publishers, release announcements, revenue | View Comments
The most common question I get (well, after “Have you ever heard the MC Hammer song? Really? You have?”) is “Isnt Lijit just a search tool?”
I always reply the same, “No, we are a publisher advocate.”
Which is always greeted with one of three responses: 1) a look of bewilderment; 2) a look of amusement; or 3) a look of agreement.
Perhaps the strangest response I get is: “Why?”
For Lijit, the answer is simple. Because our entire existence is predicated on publishers. Not our business model mind you (although thats part of it) but our core value.
Our belief about publisher widgets is that there are two types: Widgets that exist to make publishers better publishers and seek to develop a true partnership and widgets that provide some value extension to the publisher.
The first type are publisher advocates, they have to improve the entire experience, both for the publisher and the reader.
The second type either is successful only on a high traffic publisher, or only for one consistuency, the publisher or the reader.
Our guiding principle when we add features to Lijit is simple: “Are We Being Publisher Advocates?”
In other words, does this feature make a publisher a better publisher by providing better service or increased engagement to their readers?
This also limits our focus to three areas:
1. Content Discovery / Reader Engagement
By indexing all of a publisher’s social content and trusted sources, Lijit allows content that may have been buried in a general search engine search to bubble to the top. Why? Well, we only index the things that are important to you; general search engines index everything. So, our base value proposition is that a publisher’s readers should find everything that a publisher trusts and wishes to expose.
In addition, when a reader comes from a general search engine, our “Re-Search” box proves additional implicit white-labeled results that tend to have a relatively high click through rate, effectively keeping a reader on the publisher’s site versus clicking the back button to the search engine.
Our stats also provide a variety of information for a publisher including results that returned zero results, providing a clue as to what readers are looking for from the publisher, potentially helping to inspire future posts or articles.
2. Optimization of Monetization
Publisher monetization is a noisy, competitive field, and currently we are loathe to produce a sub-standard ad experience for publishers. We cannot just be Yet Another Google Adsense Clone. We have to be better.
Lijit has to create an experience where publishers are optimizing revenue from an under-monetized section of a publication, namely the search results.
Everyone knows that search can be monetized effectively, but we believe because the results driven through Lijit are more contextual and relevant, the resulting revenue should be higher for the publisher. So, we are spending a lot of time developing an effective user interface and experience. Its hard and takes a long time, and we are close.
Besides search results, there are two immediate things that occur when using Lijit search. Your current social content gets better promotion increasing your overall pageviews, driving additional revenue now.
3. Cross Promotional Traffic
This is really effective if a publisher has multiple blogs or a blog network. With Lijit a publisher can use a high volume publication to help drive traffic horizontally to lower traffic blogs through cross-promotion in the search results. On average, our blog networks find that almost 30% of the results clicked in a search result are to another network blog, rather than the originating publication.
Each of these three functions: Content Discovery/Reader Engagement, Optimization of Monetization and Cross Promotional Traffic are all examples of how we feel that we are being publisher advocates, helping publishers be better publishers and helping them serve their readers.
After all, at Lijit we know one thing to be an absolute truth:
If publishers didnt provide social content or trusted sources, our results pages would be empty.
Tags: ads, content discovery, monetization, page views, publisher advocate, reader engagement | View Comments