There s a Shortage of Targeted Advertising

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There's A Shortage Of Targeted Advertising

By: Pat McCarthy
2006-10-18

I respect WebreakStuff quite a bit, but Fredericks recent post about needing more relevant ads is a theme I hear a lot from web publishers.

Link: recent post about needing more relevant ads

Publishers often ask me (Right Media/RMX Direct) to find them more targeted ads, and it seems to be a common thought expressed by them. Its also common to see regular consumers such as Frederick say that theyd appreciate it if ads were more relevant, and everyone acts as if advertising companies arent trying or dont want do to that.

I work in advertising, and I dont love ads, but I know what advertising does for web publishers. It provides them revenue to keep their sites free of membership feeds, it allows them to keep publishing and pay hosting costs, or it allows them to hire a staff and make their website into a real business. These are all great things for web users who enjoy web sites for free.

So to me, advertising pays a very important role in supporting the free publishing world weve become accustomed to on the web.

That being said, Id also like to see more relevant ads. But what I dont think people are understanding is that there arent as many advertisers with unlimited budgets as they all seem to think exist. Even Google who has the largest selection of advertisers hitting the broadest amount of categories often shows totally irrelevant Adsense ads on publisher sites because they dont even have enough targeted advertisers to fit that type of content.

When I ran a site on the sport of wakeboarding, I had to work my ass off to pursue, sell, optimize, and support targeted advertisers I was selling to directly. Theres no way I could have expected an ad network to provide me with those advertisers because they didnt have the budget or need to go through an ad network. Adsense ads also didnt provide many more than a few advertisers that didnt pay very well for clicks, so even though they were relevant they werent very profitable for me as a publisher. I had to do a lot of manual work, and frankly many publishers arent going to have the time and skill to pull this off, or their industry just doesnt have retailers and product companies like wakeboarding.

Lets take a look from the ad network point of view. Lets say we have a video game publisher who wants relevant advertisers to video gaming. Its a bigger category than wakeboarding so it should work right? The network goes out and finds a couple of advertisers, but they have budgets, only want to run on certain sites, and need to achieve certain goals and results. Spread out across the 20 video game sites in my network, they each dont end up receiving that many ads, and then what are they supposed to do with the rest of their ad inventory? Show irrelevant ads is really one of their only options.

And as unfortunate as it may seem to a user, irelevant ads do perform well enough for advertisers and publishers in many instances that they are profitable. And that profit helps keep their businesses running letting you read content on the web for free.

Were trying to help this problem at Right Media by growing our exchange with as many buyers and sellers as possible. The more buyers we have, the more targeted ads we could end up serving to users and publishers.

I just dont like the assumption that ad companies arent doing their job because ads arent relevant enough. There is constant work being done to improve targeting and provide more opportunities, but their still remains a shortage in enough targeted advertising to go around to make everyone happy and profitable.

Were trying to help solve this problem at Right Media.

Related Posts:

- Why Google Lowered The Minimum CPM
- Is There Enough Advertising Dollars For the Startups?
- Perhaps Google Isnt Out of the AOL Game
- Yahoo Has a Ton of Opportunity
- Unique Visitors Isnt The Best Single Metric

*Originally published at ConversionRater

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About the Author:
Pat is the Director of Business Development at Right Media, the business unit owner for RMX Direct, and the author of the Conversion Rater blog.


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