Pubmatic Archive

We’ve written many times about the new online advertising services that help publishers earn more from their ad inventory including PubMatic, YieldBuild and Rubicon. During my trip to the west coast, I sat down with PubMatic President Rajeev Goel to check in on how things are going and to learn about two important announcements that will be made later today. First is the launch of AdFlex and the second is their upcoming Ad Revenue conference. Check out my video discussion with Rajeev below where we discuss what success rates PubMatic publishers are seeing, the AdFlex announcement and the Ad Revenue conference.

The Ad Revenue conference will focus on helping publisher and ad networks fill unsold inventory. AdFlex is setup to serve ad networks and their need to fill certain inventory buckets. Rajeev notes that sometimes ad networks need to shrink and expand their inventory to meet a specific client need. AdFlex provides the inventory from PubMatic publishers to fill the inventory. To some extent this makes PubMatic an ad network. The discussion about AdFlex begins at the 4 minute mark in the video below.

PubMatic is out with their monthly AdPrice Index report for June 2008 and their analysis shows that prices remain stagnant and show little movement from the previous month. Web sites with less than 1 million pageviews dropped 32 cents/cpm while medium and large sites (those over 1 million views) saw a small increase leading to the overall flat movement.

PubMatic also reported that the news category was basically cut by 50% in cpm ad rates. What I am seeing on my Web sites is that CPMs are down 20% month over month on remnant (default) networks. Here are the key metrics direct from the AdPrice Index:

• On average, Web site monetization decreased by less than one percent from $0.37 in May to $.036 in June. *(Pricing data reflects net publisher monetization via ad networks and excludes ad networks’ share of ad spends as well as inventory sold directly by publishers to ad agencies or advertisers).
• By size, small size Web sites had the largest drop to $0.81 in June, down from $1.13 in May.
• By vertical, News and Gaming had significant drops, sliding $0.62 and $0.20, respectively.
• Entertainment showed the only increase jumping $0.11 from $0.29 in May to $0.40 in June.

If the trend continues that rates for smaller publishers continues to drop significantly, will these smaller publishers be forced out of business?

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

Advertising optimization service PubMatic has launched a new service today that will help site publishers maximize their revenue even more than what PubMatic could do previously. The new service is a default optimization service. Most ad networks will run some level of "default" ads — these are the ads that are displayed when the ad network has no paid ad to show. These default ads are sometimes referred to as "house" ads as well.

Most publishers will "chain" networks together so that when network A has no ad to show, it will move down the chain to network B and then network C and so on. PubMatic is changing this model by removing the chain and creating an instant on-the-fly auction for the ad slot and will show the best ad network they can based on the ad networks your site or blog are part of. I’ve been part of ad chain discussions for 10+ years and on one of the private ad boards I am on, it’s a daily discussion. The bottom line is that as a publisher you want to get every bit of juice out of the orange you can, too many publishers leave half of the juice in the orange.

Frankly, I’ve never seen this type of ad maximization and it will be interesting to see how it works over the next few months. For this to work effectively, a publisher must be signed up to enough ad networks to allow PubMatic to find the best price in the auction possible. PubMatic claims in their trials they have seen a boost of over 50% in revenue and their top client Flixster saw a "significant increase in incremental revenue." There’s more info on the new program on the PubMatic blog.

PubMatic is out with their second monthly AdPrice Index report and they believe that the U.S. economic slowdown has begun to affect online advertising. They are reporting that eCPMs for large Web sites (more than 100 million page views per month) dropped dramatically by 52 percent from 38 cents in March to 18 cents April, medium Web sites (1 million to 100 million page views per month) were nearly flat, with monetization dropping from 34 cents in March to 33 cents in April and small Web sites managed to improve their monetization, increasing from $1.17 in March to $1.29 in April.

They also have provided some stats on a variety of verticals:

Among the verticals, Social Networking led the plunge with monetization dropping 47 percent, from 37 cents in March to 19 cents in April, below January lows of 22 cents. Entertainment monetization dropped 17 percent from 40 cents in March to 33 cents in April. Gaming and Sports were down marginally (4 percent and 5 percent, respectively). Technology remained relatively flat at 83 cents in April vs. 82 cents in March, but is still off January highs of 92 cents.

Will the massive number of vertical ad networks that have launched (and will launch) help to combat this revenue drop?

It’s important to remember that this index comes from the publishers that use PubMatic to manage their ad inventory. PubMatic self reports 3,000 publishers. What I’d like to see is a breakdown of their counts for small, medium and large – meaning, how many of their publishers fall into each category. My guess is that most are small or medium. If the number of large publishers is small, that could account for some of the drop as the sample size might be quite small. I will try to see what I can find out and will report back with any findings.

Ad network optimizer PubMatic has launched their media kit tool today. For most small sites, creating a media kit can be overwhelming and timeconsuming — PubMatic is trying to change that. The PubMatic media kit includes a widget plus a main content page hosted on PubMatic. You need a PubMatic account to use the media kit service.

It took about ten minutes to create the media kit that I’ve embedded below. I’d like to see an option to only link to the page that the widget links to. Not all sites will want to embed but most will be willing to link to the page. I am wondering if this could be the first step to PubMatic helping publishers with the buy/sell process. Currently the media kit points the advertiser directly to the publisher.

Ad optimization firm PubMatic (our coverage) has launched a new tool called the AdPrice Index today. What they have created is a good start and, as an analytics nut, I look forward to the expansion of the program to allow for more criteria to be added including type of site, type of ad, day parts, etc. The actual index is prepared independently by two PhDs.

The data comes from the 3,000+ PubMatic members and reflects only ads sold from ad networks not private sales. I will assume the math makes this index statistically relevant. The amounts in the index reflect net publisher amounts.

The initial AdPrice Index findings include:

• On average, small niche Web sites (less than 1 million pages views per month) provided significantly stronger performance for advertisers than medium Web sites (1 million to 100 million page views per month) and large Web sites (over 100 million page views per month): eCPM averages for March 2008 are $1.18 for small Web sites, $0.34 for medium Web sites, and $0.38 for large Web sites. The large Web site segment includes a higher proportion of social networking, entertainment, and gaming sites than any other segment.
• eCPMs for social networking sites are among the lowest by vertical, though they have increased 69% from $0.22 in January to $0.37 in March
• In March, 76% of small Web sites saw eCPMs under $1.00, compared to 96% of medium Web sites and 94% of large Web sites
• eCPMs for technology and gaming sites are higher on average than other categories: $0.82 and $0.69 for March respectively
• Technology eCPMs have declined by 12% from January ’08 ($0.92 eCPM) to March 2008 ($0.82 eCPM)

Perhaps other advertising optimization firms like Rubicon (our coverage) and YieldBuild (our coverage) can create additional indexes to provide additional industry insight.

Last week I spoke with Rajeev Goel, PubMatic founder about their latest updates. PubMatic is a Web tool that helps you optimize the advertising you currently run on your Web site or blog. On our call, Rajeev noted that PubMatic is the only service that’s publicly available for publishers of all sizes and geographies to make them more money by automating and optimizing ad serving decisions. Today PubMatic has an exciting new contest called the PubMatic Publisher Challenge.

It’s a pretty interesting idea – publishers sign up for PubMatic, then report on their success using the program. From the top success stories, the PubMatic team selects a winner (or two) and those companies get free advertising across many of the top Web 2.0 blogs (CN is one of those blogs). So not only do you have direct financial reasons to at least try PubMatic but now you have marketing reasons as well.

The first two winners are WinCustomize and BikerOrNot. WinCustomize has seen a 106% increase in eCPMs since using PubMatic’s service to optimize across ad networks. BikerOrNot has seen a 150% increase in revenues since implementing PubMatic.

My advice to Rajeev when we further discussed PubMatic last week is to work with the advertising systems they partner with to have the advertiser platforms create "proxy logins" – this way if a publisher wants to work with PubMatic, they can give PM a login that has restrictions such as read-only or certain modification options. We are using the tool and look forward to sharing our results later in the year. And the more I thought about proxy logins, this should be offered on many advertiser, analytics and financial systems. There is HUGE potential there for someone to capitalize on.

Editor’s note: PubMatic is a current CenterNetworks sponsor.