01.11.2008
Another powerful data point from JPMorgan’s Nothing But Net report:
“While portals were once dominant, Yahoo!, AOL, and Microsoft only accounted for ~29% of minutes spent online in August 2007, down from 42% in August 2002. Meanwhile, blogs, online gaming, and social networking websites have experienced double to triple digit Y/Y growth rates in page views. This fragmented audience not only makes it more difficult for advertisers to reach their target audience through only a few publishers, but also makes it difficult for publishers to attract advertisers given their limited scale. We believe that companies that can aggregate traffic through the development of ad networks or partnerships will be more successful in driving growth in 2008.”
11.07.2007
According to Nielsen (see NY Times), banner ads for Mitt Romney’s presidential candidate ran 515,000 times on Gay.com. AOL’s Advertising.com, the ad network that accidentally put ads for the anti-gay candidate on the pro-gay (and anti-Romney) site, says the number of impressions was only 32,000.
Romney’s ads also ran alongside pornographic scenes of Harry Potter and Hermione Granger on fiction site FanFiction.net. McCain ads ran on liberal-leaning Huffington Post, Guliani ads ran on progressive DailyKos, Obama ads ran on Amazon alongside a book deemed by Jewish groups to be anti-Semitic.
“Part of the issue seems to be that political strategists came into the campaign season unschooled in the challenges of Internet advertising, and Web advertising sales outlets are not necessarily aware of the unique sensitivities of each presidential campaign.”
I believe the first part — political strategists may not know how online ad networks work. But the second? Oh come on. The problem isn’t that the people at “Web advertising sales outlets” like Advertising.com aren’t politically savvy enough to understand the “unique sensitives” of their advertisers. It’s that they don’t have those people on staff; the ads are targeted and served by computer algorithms that don’t know how to worry about sensitivities.