ChrisP Ramblings

With the decline in the worldwide economy I’ve seen a nasty decline in advertising revenue across the sites that I manage.  Many years ago a pulled any ads in new windows (popup, pop unders, etc) because too many users found them too annoying.  While those ads format are profitable advertising in general needs to be balanced with user experience.

Where I’m at now is trying to determine what the minimum amount of revenue an ad needs to generate per 1,00o impressions (otherwise know as CPM).  While I won’t specifically discuss the CPM here I am willing to discuss the concept.

How much does a reducing in ads on a site increase the visitors afinity for that site?  How many fewer ad placements would make the user link to the website, talk about it, or a least bookmark it?

There is another philosphy.  Rather than look at each ad placement and it’s CPM, look at the page as a whole.  Many sites seem to have done this an when the page CPM gets below a certain amount they add another placement.  Looking at a few site here…  CNN – 3 ads on an article (I’ve seen more in the past), Yahoo – 3 (more if you include Yahoo Personals, Real Estate),  LA Times – 5, Newsweek – 7.  I’ve always been annoyed when ad space on a page is more than the article I’m reading.

For the time being I think it’s worth isolating every ad location, demographic, and page, then figure out of there is a better ad that can be located there.  I belive that’s good for a number of reasons:  ONE – distributes revenue sources, reduces dependency on one advertiser (or network), TWO – increases revenue without increasing ad palcements,  THREE – increases ad diversity so hopefully decreases ad blindness, FOUR – increases site exposure to more ad networks or advertisers, possibly increasing competition for future ad space.

In thinking what is best for the visitor fewer, less intrusive, more on topic ads would seem to be the goal.

What do you think?

For quite a while I was using the old PHPAdsNew ad serving platform. Recently I saw that there was an upgrade to OpenX. I like to be on top of security upgrades so I bit the bullet and upgraded. I had a number of issues with the upgrade and ultimately chose to just wipe everything and start from scratch. After having run the platform for something like to months I’m sad to say that the new product is more steps back than forward. Two of the main issues I have with the platform. (which others have reported)

1. Runs in GMT time zone and jacks up the time zone for my CMS when run in local mode.
   
2. Cannot reset stats.
   

Unfortunately I’m now in the market for a new ad server platform. I’d like to do a local installation so there is less javascript on my pages, less interaction with a third party, etc. One of the other solutions I’ve looked into, but does not have a intuitive interface, is the Google AdManager platform. Anyone have other suggestions?