Mike On Ads

Users, not advertisers

A friend directed me to an interesting post on Publishing 2.0 — ‘Ad Platforms vs. Ad Networks: Who Controls The Advertiser Relationship?‘ — using the new Time Inc/Quigo relationship as an example the author argues that “As more advertising dollars pour online [...] whoever controls the advertiser relationship holds all the cards”.

This comment made me think for a while about the publishers role in online advertising. Is it really all about building advertiser relationships? Most publishers that I have talked to over the past few years split their media into two buckets — premium & remnant. One sales force focuses on agencies and another on ad-networks and direct marketers. Often the second salesforce is one or two people who spend their days prioritizing networks.

Although advertiser relationships matter a lot on an individual deal basis, but I don’t see them as something that can be “controlled”. Think about it — lets say you have a great “premium” sales guy, Joe, who has solid relationships with two large agencies. He used to work at one and has a whole set of friends at the other. Quarter after quarter Joe just keeps bringing in tons of business. Well, what happens when Joe is poached by another company and leaves? Was the strength of the relationship based on Joe or on the company? What if Joe calls up the agencies from his new job and tries to convince them to move their dollars to his new gig? Who will the agency go with? It’s not that relationships aren’t valuable, but they are largely based on personal relationships between people — something that is far more fragile than a deep technical integration.

If it’s not advertiser relationships, what should publishers focus on? First and foremost every publisher should focus on increasing the user-experience on his properties, attracing more and higher quality users and collecting more information about said users. I think Niki Scevak has it right in this post — Running an Ad Network — where Niki argues “You’ve heard me crap on about the business model of ad networks enough but here it is again: over time all the value goes to the person who owns the consumer relationship.“. It’ kind of like that movie Field of Dreams, “If you build it, he will come”. Not that you don’t still have to work to bring in the advertiser dollars, but quality users make selling a lot easier.

The means of trading

So lets look at the example Time/Quigo cited above. Pre-Quigo, Time used Adsense because it enabled both contextual based buying and smaller credit-card based advertising on Time Inc. Adsense was able to provide a certain level of efficient buying and hence was able to pay higher rates than other advertisers. Citing from the Media Post article on the subject, Quigo states that “This is about publishers who want control over the ad-serving process, rather than outsourcing it to a blind network.” Well, I call bullshit!

This isn’t about Time gaining control — they’re simply transferring control from one party to another. Before the deal they had control over their users and inventory, and now they still have control over their users and inventory. The only real difference is that instead of sharing some margin with Google & Yahoo they are sharing some margin with Quigo. Quigo is getting exclusive control over the contextual advertising on Time Inc. Not convinced? Why don’t we take a look at the terms of service of a contextual buy on Time Inc

1. Display of Advertisement. Advertiser agrees that Quigo may display the advertisement Advertiser places in the AdSonar interface (the “Advertisement”) on the Quigo Network through the AdSonar Service and its affiliated sites on which Quigo places AdSonar advertisements

That’s right — this isn’t an exclusive Time Inc contextual advertising account I just signed up for, it’s a full-fledged Quigo account, it even works when I go login through the regular Adsonar login portal. So Time transferred control over the means of serving the ad from Google & Yahoo over to Quigo. So why do we care? The thing that is up for control is the means by which ad-impressions are traded or transacted. In the example above, Quigo may have tricked Time into thinking they were getting more control but really it’s three giants battling over one method (contextual matching) of serving ads on Time Inc’s inventory.

I find it hard to believe that this is financially the best move for Time. If Google or Yahoo pays a higher rate than Quigo, do you really care whether you are “selling directly” or not? Which brings me to my last thought of the day. Assuming a publisher has built up a quality user base, the focus should be on empowering all advertisers to best monetize the available inventory. Who cares if it’s Yahoo, Google, Quigo or even Bidclix! Whomever pays the most should get the inventory. If today that’s Google, great, but if tomorrow it’s Quigo then give more to them.

Next up

I realize that this post leaves a lot of questions unanswered — in my next posts I’ll talk more about maximizing revenue by pricing networks efficiently and also about how ad-networks, exchanges and technology providers are fighting for control over the means by which ad-inventory is traded.

The developers over at the Google Maps API posted an interesting post today about how to integrate Yahoo! Pipes with Google Maps. Didn’t think I’d see the day where Google would be recommending a Yahoo service, but pretty cool that they’re allowed to! I really love this new age of APIs for everything. Will we soon see a whole industry of services that simply provide integration between various offerings using APIs?

I’d like to continue my series. If you haven’t already, be sure to read Part I and Part II first.

After my first two points I received multiple questions around the lines of “Who will make money off of this?”, and “Who benefits most?”, “How will ad-networks survive in this environment?”. Well, I thought we’d take a look at the various types of players in the market today and discuss how they will thrive/survive/die in the exchange environment. When discussing each of these I imagine a world in which there are two or three major ad-exchanges. Say, Googleclick, Righthoo & Micro7 … Any business that wants to play has to in involved with one or more of the exchanges as in this new world, 95% of all inventory gets sold on the exchange.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you haven’t already, be sure to read The Ad-Exchange Model (Part I) first as this is a continuation of that post.

Technology Integration

I’m sure you’ve got a picture in your head by now that there’s an annoying manual process here. Well, the technology piece gets worse. Today, most technologies that companies will consider “competitive advantages” are either optimization/prediction algorithms, contextual engines or behavioral datasets. Say we have this company called Google that has a great technology that matches ads to page content. The payout on each click depends greatly on what the ad is for. Pages relevant to autos or medication will net far higher payments than pages about the local pizza joint. So how is the publisher to decide when to show ‘Adsense’ over the $1.00 CPM deal he just signed? There’s absolutely no way for the Publisher to know the effective CPM of the adsense ad before he shows it.

Currently there are two ways that publishers manage this problem. The first is to simply accept an inefficiency in pricing. He may prioritize Google Adsense at $0.95 CPM across all pages because on average that’s what he can expect to receive at the end of the month. The other option would be to setup tens or hundreds of different tags targeted to different types of pages and then setup different prices for each. Again, this would require setting up tens or hundreds of categories in Adsense and then trafficking tens or hundreds of different tags into the Publisher’s adserver. Not really the best solution.

What about a behavioral advertiser that wants to buy New York Times traffic because he thinks he has data on some of the users. Since the behavioral data is stored in his cookie (see my post here about behavioral advertisers) there is no way for the Publisher to know which of his users will be valuable to the advertiser! How is he supposed to price this? This one isn’t so easy. One way is for the advertiser to simply buy a flat rate for all New York Times users and then simply count the users for which he doesn’t have data as a loss. The other would be some sort of rudimentary integration where the advertiser drops a pixel for the Publisher’s cookie domain for his users. Again, not ideal, not simple and INEFFICIENT!

High Latency/Slow Adserving

Each call to a different adserver costs time. The more hops that a user’s browser has to go to to receive the actual ad, the more likely that he is to click-off to another page before he actually sees it. Try it, go to myspace.com and click through on a few links. How often did the actual ad finish loading? The higher the number of systems involved in an ad call, the higher the difference between how many impression the Advertiser and Publisher’s systems count. Last I heard, 5-10% of impressions are lost for each additional adserver that is added to an ad-chain.

The Exchange Model

Fundamentally I believe people don’t quite understand why Ad-Exchanges are key is because they don’t realize that an ad-exchange is simply a glorified adserver. Really… nothing special, just one centralized system instead of three or more. Take a look a the following diagram:

Notice a difference? In this case, there’s only ONE request to ONE system, the ad-exchange. The exchange is the ecosystem through which advertisers, publishers and networks all manage their businesses. Some may integrate their contextual technologies, some may simply use the system to set prices. But it’s ONE ADSERVER! Lets revisit the three main challenges we listed before.

Pricing/Operational Inefficiency — On the Exchange

Now that the advertiser and the publisher are both on the same system the whole world changes. There is no longer a need to transfer “tags” back and forth, as all the data is in the same system. Pricing is also no longer an issue as the advertiser has integrated his technology solution with the exchange and can now bid a different price on each ad impression depending on the page the user is visiting.

Technology Integration

Although there is still a significant amount of work to be done to integrate an Advertiser’s technology solution with the exchange, it’s worth it since it’s work that only needs to be done once. Once done, this technology will work across any and all publishers. Imagine this, the New York Times starts using Googleclick as their adserver, which is, of course, fully integrated with adsense. The NYT no longer has to worry about inefficient pricing for Adsense as the technology will be integrated with exchange. On every ad-call, Adsense can check the page content and place and appropriate bid according to the types of ads that it would place. Genius right?

Now what about the Behavioral network? Of course it will integrate it’s data with the exchange, and again, on every ad call it can enter bids on the users that it has data on and even price differently based on the types of data. Of course it will be slightly more difficult to integrate technology with the exchange adserver as by nature it’s more complex than a basic adserver, but this doesn’t really matter. Since the Advertiser only has to integrate his technology once, with one adserver it’s worth the effort.

High Latency/Slow Adserving

This one should be pretty obvious. Since there is only one request, ads serve faster and fewer impressions are lost.

Final Thoughts

I realize this post is long, but I think it’s important that people realize the true value that Exchanges bring to the market. It’ll be fascinating to see how the market changes as Google and Yahoo each attempt to take control of the billions of dollars of advertising that flow through the internet every day. This new model will truly change the online advertising world for the better, except perhaps for those ad-networks out that there purely benefit from the pricing and operational inefficiencies that exist in todays world.

Stay tuned for more thoughts on the potential acquisition of 24/7 by Microsoft, securing an exchange, ‘broker networks’!

Clearly the recent acquisitions of both Doubleclick and Right Media by Google and Yahoo respectively signal a strong vote of confidence in the ad-exchange model. Reading all the news coverage of these two acquisitions made me realize that very few people out there realize the true value proposition of a centralized exchange. Sure, “transparent marketplaces”, and “auction models” are great, but why is this better than any of the existing ad-networks — Google Adsense, Advertising.com, YPN, etc.?

The Basics — A simple publisher serving ads

First lets start with a really basic question — What is an adserver? Before we can talk about an exchange, you have to understand how adserving works today. In it’s most basic form an adserver serves ads on web pages, tracks clicks on those ads and then provides reporting on the ads served and the number of clicks received on those ads. In the online space today, the vast majority of publishers, networks and advertisers all have their own adservers.

Ok, so how does it really work? Well, the first thing you need to understand is how the ad-request actually happens. To request an ad from an adserver the publisher, or website, must place an ad-tag on their page. An ad-tag is simply a snippet of HTML, generally either some Javascript or an IFRAME that tells the browser to request some content from the adserver. Here’s an example tag:

<IFRAME FRAMEBORDER=0 MARGINWIDTH=0 MARGINHEIGHT=0 SCROLLING=NO WIDTH=468 HEIGHT=60 SRC=\"http://ad.yieldmanager.com/imp?Z=468x60&s=2948&t=3\"></IFRAME>


This little snipper of HTML, when placed on a web page, informs the browser to open a small window (460×60 pixels), and in that window place whatever content is returned from “http://ad.yieldmanager.com/imp?Z=468×60&s=2948&”. When I loaded this in a browser I got the following response (truncated for clarity):

<a target="_blank" href="http://ad.yieldmanager.com/click,AAAAAIQL[...]AOUINkYAAAAA,,,"><img border="0" alt=""height="60" width="468" src="http://content.yieldmanager.edgesuite.net/atoms/8c/21/8c21402b07a3ca60e6af42e48b09a3cc.gif"></a>

Which essentially tells the browser to load an image from content.yieldmanager.com (the ad), and then when the user clicks to send him to ad.yieldmanager.com/click. Here’s a basic little diagram that outlines this simple process:

Ok, so you understand the most basic implementation of a web-page with an adserver. Now lets look at reality.

Life gets complicated — the advertiser has his own adserver

In the example above, when an ad was requested the adserver immediately responded with an image. This implies that when it comes time to pay for the ads served that the advertiser is going to rely on the Publisher’s reporting system to determine how much money he owes. In reality the advertiser is interested in tracking information as well. What this means is that both the advertiser AND the publisher need to have their own adservers. Now, the publisher’s adserver can’t immediately return an ad, instead it returns a SECOND ad tag that points to the advertiser’s adserver. Here’s another pretty diagram:

Now imagine that there’s an ad-network representing the advertiser that’s sitting in the middle, in which case what we get is:

What’s wrong with this picture?

So by looking at the diagrams above I hope you get a sense that this isn’t the most efficient of ways to buy and sell media. Think about it, for each individual ad we have to request content from three different systems! This means three times too much work is being done. So lets dig a little deeper. Essentially, the traditional adserving model has three key problems:

1. Pricing/Operational Inefficiency
2. Technology Integration
3. High latency / Slow Adserving

Lets dig into these three.

Pricing/Operational Inefficiency

One of the things I forgot to mention above is that each point of integration between two adservers is manual work. If the Advertiser wants to buy 10 million impressions at $1.00 CPM from a Publisher the following process generally happens:

1. Publisher sales rep contacts advertiser
2. Publisher and advertiser negotiate contract terms (e.g. 10M @ $1.00)
3. Publisher and advertiser sign a contract
4. Advertiser sets up the ads in his adserver and sends over the “ad-tags” for the media buy
5. Publisher has trouble trafficking ad-tags into his system and contacts his support department
6. 5 days later, Publisher finally manages to get the ad-tags live and the campaign starts

So what’s wrong here? First off, there’s a certain inefficiency here. When the advertiser decides he wants 10 million impressions he probably specifies a certain set of targeting parameters to ensure that the Publisher sends him users that will be likely to be interested in his offer. For example, he may want over 18 males with a maximum of 4 ads shown to each user every day. Clearly there is a problem here. Depending on the offer, 18-25 males might be far more valuable than 50-85 year old males. Also, the first ad the user sees is far more likely to elicit a response than the second or third. So what do people do? Well, instead of setting one fixed price for all over 18 users he could setup 20 difference prices. Ten different age buckets (e.g. 18-25, 25-30, 30-35, 35-40) and two different frequency buckets (e.g. first ad, second through third ads). Well, this makes life a little bit better but there are still some problems here. First off, the higher the number of pricing points, the longer the entire process outlined above takes. 20 price points means 20 different tags in the Advertiser’s adserver, and 20 tags to upload into the Publisher’s adserver, and 20 different tags for which the Publisher may need to contact his support department for help. Here’s a nice little diagram –

In this new digital age of APIs and digital systems, why the hell does this take so much work? Can’t we do this in a better way? Well, at some point people realized that pricing flat CPM rates for inventory wasn’t the most efficient way to do things and came up with Cost Per Click (CPC) and Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) pricing models. In these systems the advertiser simply specifies how much he’s willing to pay per Click or Acquisition (generally a purchase, or lead form) and lets the publisher’s system determine the best users to deliver ads. Although this system is better than the above it introduces another set of problems. The advertiser now becomes wholly dependent on the Publisher’s optimization/prediction algorithms, which may or may not be any good! I can continue here for ages, but I’m pretty sure you are getting a sense of how inefficient the current system is.

Enough for one post. Stay tuned tomorrow for Part II — Tech issues and how the exchange model helps.

Update: Part II is ready, read on here: The Ad-Exchange Model (Part II)

ClickZ has a great post tearing apart the Financial Times for writing an absolutely TERRIBLE article about the Googleclick acquisition.

Come on guys! Doubleclick sells adserving. Adserving + Search == Great match. Display is growing like crazy.