Dec 25, 2009 Posted on Dec 25, 2009 in online-advertising

Online ad rates – to be taken with a grain of salt

I stumbled across a post over at adage.com, which I found quite interesting but not for the apparent reason. At the end of the post you’ll find a slide-show showing common rates for booking certain big sites (or parts of them) like yahoo.com, aol.com or youtube.

The usual reaction will be something along the lines of “wow $600,000 to book yahoo’s front-page for a day? Who’s got that kind of money?”. All of the prices in that slide show seem extraordinarily high and that’s not just an impression, if you’ve ever experimented with online campaigns over platforms like e.g. Google Adwords, you know that real prices paid in online advertising are far lower (and getting lower each day actually – some of the reasons are cited in the adage.com article at the beginning).

There is always some form of negotiation (discounts etc.) for agencies that really run their campaigns daily on those sites.  Marketplaces like AdBrite offer this process as an automated feature. The only site that would ever reach such exorbitant prices (probably far beyond that even) is the front-page of Google’s search engine (ad-space on that site has never been sold to any advertiser).

But truly interesting inside that slideshow is the service Ad.ly which is used as a platform by top twitterers to monetize the traffic they receive through followers. Advertisers pay a certain “cost per tweet” which upon acceptance by the publisher entitles someone like e.g. Kim Kardashian to twitter about grilled chicken salads and get paid for it.

An interesting concept reminding me of ad marketplaces like AdBrite for typical online advertising (just that no auction seems to take place on Ad.ly), which brings together publishers and advertisers in an automated, standardized process for buying and selling ad-space.

The problem is that what’s sold on Ad.ly is not comparable to “ad-space” per se. It is fake content produced by twitterers that initially reached a number of followers based upon their credibility, the quality of their content or their celebrity status. Usually when someone visits a website, advertise can be separated at a glance from the real content. A crucial component – I daresay – that makes advertise in any kind of media bearable.

Yes, celebrities or sportsmen often have “sponsors” which they endorse in one way or the other and in some cases people won’t even know that such a relationship exists. But this is simply not the same. It’s like reading a good blog that you appreciate for the type of content the author produces and only for that. Then fake posts start to appear, advertising certain products, which destroy the credibility of an author. The thing that bothers a fan the most in such a case is that he is “tricked” into believing, that the post is authentic because it is not clearly marked as advertise.

In my opinion this is bound to sully the image of any big twitter account, maybe not at the first tweet but as soon as people get tired about reading tweets on mediocre grilled chicken salad on a daily base.

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