|
A division of Burst Media
Grow Reach, Grow Scale, Grow Revenue
Using Instant Networks to Grow Your Media Business
April 2009Grow Reach, Grow Scale, Grow Revenue
Reach: Easy to Sell, Hard to Build
In the advertising world, marketers need to make sure that their message is heard, seen, and engaged with by as much of their target audience as possible. More reach to the target audience means more visibility. More visibility means more sales. When media planners make decisions about where to place their budgets, reach to a target audience is one of the ? rst measures they use to whittle down the list of resources they will use to distribute their message. While traditional media -- print newspapers and magazine in particular -- are in Digital ad the midst of a revenue crisis, online media properties are gaining an increasing share of ad budgets are dollars spent by marketers. According to the latest CMO Survey (February 2009), CMOs expected to increase by expect to decrease traditional advertising budgets by more than 7%, but will increase digital more than budgets by over 10%, led by both business and consumer service sectors. 10% in 2009. In a Forrester Research survey ? elded earlier this year, 72% of interactive marketers indicated that they expect to maintain or even increase their digital budgets during a recession (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: Interactive Marketers Expect To Hold Steady Or Increase Spend During A Recession
With the increase in ad spending, most online publishers should continue to see growth in their revenues. However, to garner a higher percentage of ad budgets, publishers need more reach, and in today's economy broader reach can be expensive. The cost to market content sites is high, acquiring companies is risky, and overall Internet growth in terms of unique visitors has slowed to only 4% per year. Additionally, a lot of online time and attention has shifted to social media sites, taking visitors away from the relevant content that advertisers like to be associated with. With independent and social media sites rapidly gaining audience the question can be asked, how does a publisher continue to provide the relevance and reach needed to appeal to advertisers?
Building Reach - April 2009 2 A division of Burst MediaDemand for Quality Content
The good news is that advertisers still want to appear on high quality content sites. Yet according to comScore MediaMetrix, of the top 100 ad-focused sites in terms of uniques, only 45 create and curate their own content. The only content-centric properties to grow their overall reach have acquired additional media properties over the course of the last year. The rest are portals, social media sites, and ad networks - many of which have experienced slowing audience growth. Research by Advantage Media for YouGov found that only 12% of web users pay much attention to ads on large general interest web sites. However, the power of interest-based content produced by Long Tail publishers is much
With Internet stronger. According to the report, 73% of users say they pay attention to the ads on growth specialty content sites. For large media properties to grow, they need to think differently slowing, the about where their growth comes from (see Figure 2).battle for attention is intensifying - Figure 2: Features Comparison of Four Segments of Web PropertiesLong Tail sites are winning Portalsthe ght. . Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL. Broad Content. Massive ReachTop 50. iViilage, CNN, WebMD, CNET. Focused Content. High Reachsnois Mid-Tailser . CDKitchen, RealGM.com, pm Kiwibox.comI . Focused Content Long-Tail. Medium Reach . 1,000s of Web Sites. Highly Focused Content. Small Reach
# of Web Sites
The Cost of Growing Reach
The cost of growth is high - media properties spend millions of dollars each year to drive web visitors to their site. According to Advertising Age, the media sector spent over $5 billion in advertising to draw readers to their publications, making it the 12th largest sector for ad spend in the U.S. In order to grow overall revenue, publishers need a source of supplemental reach that is similar in editorial quality, and from which they can identify and promote the composition of the audience. These publishers must be able to walk into an advertiser or agency comfortable that they are extending the val... [download for more]
|
