This post originally was written for and appeared in adexchanger.com. The comparison of “analog dollars” to “digital dimes” is often an attempt to explain that paltry digital revenue is coming from commoditized advertising prices.  When you dig deeper into rate cards, the reality is quite the opposite – digital rates are more expensive than print!  The digital dimes issue does not stem from pricing but from size and quality of audience.  Here some math to explain. I reviewed individual media kits from 10 B2B publishers that contained both print and digital advertising units to get apples to apples comparison of print vs. digital within one publisher.  A consistent theme emerged – digital advertising rates were higher than print advertising rates.  [...]

Audience metrics are the key for publishers to increases prices and advertising revenue.  In fact, right now most publishers are charging more than they think for advertising, because who receives the page views dictates the real price of advertising.  But without the right metrics, they are not able to package and price their advertising inventory to maximum revenue potential. Most publishers sell advertising inventory based on aggregate measures of page views and unique visitors, assuming that views are distributed evenly among visitors. But here’s the reality. First, a small number of loyal visitors (“Fans”) consumes a disproportionately large number of page views (and ad impressions), while a large number of one-time visitors (“Fly-bys”) consumes disproportionately few and a small number [...]

Posted by: Matt Shanahan Spurred by a considerable uptick in discussions with B2B publishers, I’ve been thinking a lot about the strategies of revenue optimization.  Obviously, the publishing world is grappling with the transition to digital as traditional print advertising declines; suddenly online advertising revenue is moving from incremental to future core. The move has triggered a search for tools that offer tuning, refinement and optimization, and that’s where we’ve been fitting into the discussion.   In talking with customers, I’ll admit I was a bit surprised by the simplicity of the current ad pricing models in place. While the impression (CPM) and conversion (CPA)-based units of online advertising inventory are firmly entrenched, there is little sophistication associated with pricing [...]