The Consolidating Publisher Market And You

As more and more ad dol­lars come online in 2009, adver­tis­ers will nat­u­rally fol­low the con­sumers. So, where are the con­sumers? Or, to put it a finer point on it, who con­trols the largest share of ad units?

The Stan­dard Oil Of Online Adver­tis­ing?
Henry Blod­get writes in Sil­i­con Val­ley Insider that Google is going to “con­tinue an inex­orable march to 80–90% share” of the search mar­ket. As of Novem­ber 2008, they con­trolled 63.5%, up from their Octo­ber share of 63.3% while Microsoft, Ask and AOL have all seen their shares decline. Seri­ously guys, pull it together or Blodget’s omi­nous pre­dic­tion may come true.

On the dis­play side it’s more of the same. A recent Attrib­u­tor study shows Dou­bleclick (owned by Google) and AdSense (ditto) con­trol a col­lec­tive 57% of the dis­play mar­ket. Granted, AdSense dis­plays three text ads per unit so those num­bers are inflated, but by com­par­i­son Yahoo! — a pre­mier pub­lisher and one of the most vis­ited sites on the planet — has only 9.7%. Microsoft, which owns Atlas, has a mea­ger 4%. As I said ear­lier, pull it together (or merge once and for all) or you’re toast.

What’s An Adver­tiser To Do?
It goes with­out say­ing that adver­tis­ers reach the most tar­geted audi­ence they can find at the best pos­si­ble price. How­ever, one of the many down­sides to this con­sol­i­da­tion is ris­ing CPC and CPM costs. We can’t afford to pay more for the same amount of traf­fic we were get­ting yes­ter­day, sim­ply because the pub­lisher mar­ket is consolidating.

Adver­tis­ers need to dig a lit­tle deeper than just fol­low­ing the eye­balls. They need to take an objec­tive view on where they spend their money. What’s con­vert­ing the best? How are you mea­sur­ing social media, mobile, video, email, affil­i­ate traf­fic, paid search, organic search and so on? How are you attribut­ing your con­ver­sions across all of these channels?

Don’t just blindly fol­low the mar­ket trends and over­pay for ads. Mea­sure, test and opti­mize. This may already be the advertiser’s mantra, but as the mar­ket forces work against us in the com­ing years it will need to become our way of life.