Tags: In mid-September LinkedIn, the social networking site for business professionals, announced it was branching into the ad network space. It now sells ad space on other publishers’ sites, as well as its own. (It also lets those advertisers buying through them target audiences on other sites by way of demographic data LinkedIn have collected from their own site.) The announcement was immediately followed by another, this time by MTV, that it too would move into the ad network space.
This is nothing new. This is effectively the step that the world’s largest publishers (Yahoo!, Google and MSN) took months ago. Traditional publishers like Fox have done it too. For these large players, it’s a natural step: if you’ve already got an ad sales force doing a good job of attracting direct advertising, and they’re filling the space on your site – why not get that same sales force to sell those same advertisers’ space on other publishers’ sites, and take a cut?
What has excited us at OpenX a great deal recently, however, is how many smaller OpenX-powered sites have told us they’re taking similar steps.
Niche publishers forming niche networks: what are some OpenX publishers doing?
Many publishers in the OpenX community are smaller sites with very high quality, niche inventory that advertisers typically find hard to reach. These niche sites may have a direct ad sales force team (in some cases a team of one). In many cases, these sites have reached out to other “like-minded” sites with similar content, and either combined their ad sales operations, or one publisher will sell on behalf of the second. There are two key benefits to forming these “niche networks”:
- Scale. Niche publishers often have exactly the kind of audience that advertisers want to reach, but not the scale to attract the big name advertisers that spend the big $s. By combining with other sites, they can build that scale and work their way up the advertising food-chain.
- Cost efficiency. Why pay for two ad sales teams (one at each publisher), when you can get more efficiency out of a single team selling across two sites?
What can OpenX do to help?
At OpenX, we’ve long believed that our publishers don’t get the best possible deal, and by working together more closely as a community, they can do better. For that reason, we’re very excited by these developments. We’re delighted that those publishers that take the above step often use OpenX to serve ads across multiple websites, and find it comfortably scales with them as they expand to selling and sometimes managing inventory on a much broader set of sites. We want to know if there are other simple things we can do, to help our publishers develop in this direction. Would it be helpful if we:
- Provided a “publisher directory” with contact details, so that OpenX publishers could easily identify other “like-minded” publishers?
- Provided website functionality for users to set up “publisher groups”, in which publishers can share best practice and even specific ad-related deals?
What other suggestions do you have?
Regarding the notion of a publisher directory, some thoughts:
One idea would have something resembling that Blogads have (http://web.blogads.com/adspotsfolder/ba_mininetworksfolder_view and http://web.blogads.com/adspotsfolder/choose_blogs). Now, with OpenX publisher directory, it would show categories, site info, prices and impressions in some way.
The directory submission could work from OpenX installations themselves. The section ‘Inventory > Websites & Zones > Website Properties > Basic information’ could be expanded so that a OpenX user could opt-in themselves to the directory. Website URL, Name, Category and Country/Language are already there. Would need a description field. With ‘Zones’ information, would send each zone name/location with number of ads running and asking CPM.
The OpenX software would send this information to the openx.org publisher directory. This should cut down bogus/spam submissions as it would require a running adserver.
Comment by Max — October 22, 2008 @ 10:47 am
Regarding a publisher directory and groups, I think this is a great idea. Some inventory introspection like Ad Manager would be killer too.
The easier you guys can make it for publishers to realise all their inventory is monetisable, the more compelling Open X can be.
How about an Adsense beater, one that actually generates revenues
Comment by Demian Turner — October 22, 2008 @ 4:05 pm
Thanks Max and Demian - some really useful thoughts!
Demian - we are looking at ways to make it easier for publishers running OpenX to realise full and fair value for their inventory. This is a big job - keep checking for updates to the OpenX Market - but is certainly one of our end goals. (See http://blog.openx.org/10/openx-hosted-beta-and-openx-market-alpha/ for some initial details)
Comment by Yali Sassoon — October 23, 2008 @ 9:33 am
Another small comment - notifying commentators that another comment has been added to their thread is standard on things like Wordpress, I guess Drupal doesn’t offer this. It’s a really useful feature and will vastly improve return visits to your blog.
Comment by Demian Turner — October 23, 2008 @ 11:00 am
While publishers becoming Ad Networks isn’t new, OpenX makes it easier to solve the problem of reliably managing banner rotation across multiple properties. After reaching 12 popular web sites, I got with PhpAdsNew (old OpenX) just to manage my own placement.
Now I run a popular business-to-business advertising network with a couple hundred niche publishers — but if I had to invest in Real Media OAS or DoubleClick this niche network wouldn’t survive. OpenX keeps overhead low while providing a reliable solution.
The biggest contribution to the community would be to stay focus on a solid product, especially in areas of account management and monetizing traffic. Build out the API to support insertion orders, improved impression optimization, and reporting tools that improve campaign analytics.
Best,
Justin
Comment by Justin Hitt — October 24, 2008 @ 6:44 pm
I’m developing what you are thinking and I’m looking for ways to integrate OpenX to our service - perhaps we could work something out?
http://www.ratecards.net
See also this article where I’m pointing out this combination to all users, but could be better integrated.
http://ezinearticles.com/?How-to-Implement-Advertising-on-Your-Website-Or-Blog-and-Create-Your-Own-Advertising-Rate-Card&id=1211209
Comment by Valto — October 31, 2008 @ 1:06 pm
This describes me exactly. I have started a small network to reach a very niche target of NYC moms. I agree with the above comments: directory, inventory tracking wold be great. A more user-friendly interface for customers to check their stats and possibly self-serve ads would be great too.
Comment by Anna — November 5, 2008 @ 6:43 pm