The story of Q1 2011 was that Video Publisher Inventory for Display was the most sought-after publisher display category in terms of how much an advertiser was willing to pay. In April, the only major thing that changed was how much more expensive the Video inventory was relative to all other types of Publishers.
Figure 1 shows the different publisher types compared against each other, and Figure 2 shows actual numerical performance per publisher type and how they performed in April.
Figure 1: U.S. Display Publisher Category CPMs (cost per thousand impressions) – April 2011
Figure 2: U.S. Display Publisher Type Trends
However, the Impression Share and Publisher Type data for April complete the story for Video Publishers. There was a 66% drop in the number of Video Publishers in April from Q1 as well as a 55% drop in Impression share, revealing a sharp drop in the amount of Display inventory on Video sites that advertisers were able to access.
The other interesting trend in April was the sharp rise in both the number of Business and Finance sites as well as the overall impression share from those sites compared to the Q1 period. With things like tax season and corporate Q1 earnings announcements, these types of sites would have seen a lot of traffic in April and hence were great places for Advertisers to find their audience.
These trends over longer periods of time will begin to paint an interesting picture about how society tends to browse en masse at any given period. Not surprisingly, in December 2010 we saw a spike in shopping sites. It is this type of knowledge — along with the respective CPM and CTR (click through rate) trends of advertisers’ messaging — that can help guide strategy and planning at different times of the year.
Chris Jacob