Monetization Tools & Tech

Pubonomics 101: Online Advertising Trends, It's a Buyer's Market

sovrnmarketing // September 2, 2013

This last spring I sold my house and moved my family closer to the Sovrn offices in Boulder, Colorado. What was unique was how I sold my house – I did it without a realtor. While some don’t recommend this approach, I saved money, learned quite a bit, and even had fun. But finding a new home was another challenge. I lost out on three bids at asking price, so I resorted to pulling out the stops, including sending a pleading letter to one seller with mug shots of my kids (fortunately they look like their mother). Nothing.
This is the nature of a seller’s market.
It’s a buyer’s market in the online ad industry today. We used to be able to sell banners based on “hits,” and bend our sites to accommodate flying “insert retail product here” across the screen, which we could at least sell at a premium CPM.
But times have changed. Advertisers and agencies are buying audiences in bulk. If your content generates an audience brands are looking for, they’ll buy it – but for how much? The challenge is that they usually know more about your audience (through data acquisition at scale) than you do from your own analytics. They can see your pageviews, unique users, and where your traffic is coming from – and far more. And they’re using real-time bidding infrastructure to pay as little as they can for your audience.
At sovrn, we have three distinct approaches to help you push the value exchange in a more positive direction. First, we have native advertising solutions that enable buyers to get their content aligned with the right audience and delivered to your site (if you haven’t added native units to your site, get in touch with us!). Second, we have technology that auctions your inventory and delivers display ads that match your audience at scale. Our yield solutions are robust, intelligent, and getting smarter every day (not to mention, they pay in 30 days or less). Finally, we are combining our native and programmatic offerings with the same audience data the brands use to target. Coming soon is a custom package we are calling content reach targeting that will be the first of many offerings that will help boost the value of your inventory.
What do you need to get started?  We’ll give you tags that can help us package your inventory at higher prices. What do we need from you?  Keep focusing on creating great content that generates engaged users.
Next time on Pubonomics: What do you get when you mix a banner ad, a server, and a case of beer?
Written by Scott Cunningham,  sovrn’s  SVP of Product.

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