Pubmatic Archive

Advertising optimization service PubMatic has released a new Ad Price brief which appears to be a slimmed down version of their quarterly Ad Price reports. I always like to note that Pubmatic’s report data is gathered from the Web publishers who use their service.

From the report, “New data collected by PubMatic shows that online ad pricing is turning the corner, possibly
leaving the worst days behind us….Pricing has steadily and consistently increased in the first half of 2009….However, the consistency of this data shows a trend that ad pricing may continue to rise throughout the remainder of 2009.”

PubMatic also notes that total growth in online ad pricing has risen 35% since January 1. The monthly breakdown is available in the chart below. The full report has some additional points about where ad pricing may go this year.

What I’ve seen with the sites I manage is that pricing is stronger the further you get away from technology. Even in technology, there are wide price ranges depending on the type of content.

Rob Hof at BusinessWeek spoke with PubMatic CEO Rajeev Goel and has more on the report.
 

Ad optimization firm Pubmatic has announced a new partnership with Amsterdam-based Improve Digital today. The partnership will help Pubmatic expand further into Europe and the companies say the partnership should help to increase fill-rate for publishers using the Pubmatic service.

Pubmatic self-reports over 5,500 publishers are using their service and the new partnership will bring sales, service and support in the UK, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Germany and Italy.

Pubmatic notes in the release that on average 20-40% of traffic to large U.S. publishers comes from European visitors. They believe that this new partnership will help increase the fill rate for European visitors which will lead to increased earnings.

Ad networks in the U.S. will also have access to publishers that are served by Improve Digital. Financial terms of the partnership were not provided.

Ad optimization firm Pubmatic will announce the public launch of their API tomorrow. The API was in closed beta for the past few months with a select group of ad networks. PubMatic notes that the API will allow for instant connections between ad networks and publishers for single or multiple ad campaigns on demand.

PubMatic says that the benefits to publishers include increased reach, targeting and better control over campaigns. On the publisher side, the benefits include increased monetization, increased visibility, and zero integration.

I like what Pubmatic and competitors Rubicon and YieldBuild are offering. They are all trying to help publishers squeeze out every penny from their advertising inventory. My guess is that just like career sites are doing well in the current economic environment, these new ad optimization startups will also do well this year.

I assume the API documentation will be available tomorrow. Check out all of our Pubmatic coverage including our video interview with President Rajeev Goel.

Ad optimization firm Pubmatic has notified it’s users that as of February 28, 2009 they will be discontinuing their mediakit widget service. We covered the launch of the mediakit service just about a year ago. The concept was to help sites that sell advertising create a media kit easily.

Here’s a snippet from the email Pubmatic sent out:

PubMatic has experienced unprecedented growth in the past year and, like any growing company, we have to adjust and focus on providing the most value to our publisher clients. This means we’ve stepped up the innovation around our technology and services and as a result, we are discontinuing the use of our MediaKit widget effective February 28, 2009. Although we won’t have the MediaKit widget anymore, you can rest assured that we’ll be offering many new products and introducing big improvements to our service for online publishers throughout the year.

Here’s what the widget looks like:

If you are a publisher trying to maximize the unsold ad inventory on your Web site or blog, the Ad Revenue 2008 conference might be worth checking out. The conference is run by PubMatic who we’ve written about several times on CN. The event speakers are from companies including Adify, VideoEgg, Flixster, Meebo, Quantcast and NBC Universal.

We were provided with two tickets for CN readers. I am happy to announce that the following CN readers won the free tickets:

• Jimmy K
• Billy S

If you weren’t one of the lucky winners, you can register now and grab a 20% discount by registering with the code ‘CNTRNTWRKS’. The event will be held on November 14th in San Francisco. We are listed as a media sponsor of the event.

If you are a publisher trying to maximize the unsold ad inventory on your Web site or blog, the Ad Revenue 2008 conference might be worth checking out. The conference is run by PubMatic who we’ve written about several times on CN. The event speakers are from companies including Adify, VideoEgg, Flixster, Meebo, Quantcast and NBC Universal.

We were provided with two tickets for CN readers. If you’d like one, send in a request and we will pick the winners next Friday. Alternatively, you can register now and grab a 20% discount by registering with the code ‘CNTRNTWRKS’.

The event will be held on November 14th in San Francisco. We are listed as a media sponsor of the event.

PubMatic is out with their quarterly AdPrice Index report for Q3 2008. Just skimming the report it’s easy to see that every chart is down from previous quarters.

PubMatic also reported that Social Networks is still the lowest priced category with Sports a close second, coming in at 21 cents and 25 cents, respectively. They also report that Entertainment had the most significant drop of all verticals, dropping 42% from 57 cents in Q1 ‘08 to 33 cents in Q3 ‘08. I am finding on our sites that rates have leveled out and AdSense performance is actually up by a small percentage. Here are the key metrics direct from the AdPrice Index:

• For all sites in aggregate, Q3 08’s average ad price of 27 cents is a 27% drop from Q1’s price of 37 cents and a 21% drop from Q2’s price of 34 cents
• In Q3 of 2008, the value of ad inventory on Small websites ($0.61) was more than triple that of Large sites ($0.18) – small sites under 1 million pageviews a month, large over 100 million a month

As always, note that the AdPrice Index only measures data from publishers using PubMatic for ad serving.