Walking by the Post Office today, it was hard not to appreciate just how much the Internet has changed the way we live. I’m not talking about bringing out our compulsions, ala Foursquare but something as fundamental as mail. The Internet has not only changed the way we receive communications, e.g., how banks and other bills no longer require a physical copy, it has forever altered the way we connect, consume, and operate. But, what is the Internet, really good for? Well, if you are a fan of the musical Avenue Q, the Internet is good for one thing…porn. In other words, it’s good for sucking up time. Take for example when Google changed their logo to a playable game of Pac-Man in celebration of the arcade classic’s 30th birthday. According to a time management website, Google gave back some of its $59bn in economic value, costing the workplace $120mm. This of course assumes that the estimated 4.8 million hours of time spent that day playing were indeed in lieu of productive hours. Whether through Pac-Man or Facebook, the value, or should we say lack of value, that the Internet provides also comes into question frequently.
The Internet, though, is not to blame. It’s just a reflection of who we are, and just as there are tools to make our lives better and more productive, there are those ready made for when we don’t have a purpose or can be easily dissuaded from continuing down our initial course of action. In other words, the Internet has a lot of crap, and there is a bunch of crap traffic. What is crap? Crap is the (almost) unmonetizable. It has existed since the dawn of the Internet, and it will continue to exist as long as we are the users of the Internet. Crap is the time waster or the brand unsafe. It is the low quality, bottom feeding content, whose biggest flaw as far as the web is concerned, is being free. For as bad as crap is overall, there is just so much of it, and while at some level those who facilitate the crap do so out of more personal than business reasons initially, that inventory sits there almost begging to be made into something. That’s where the performance marketers come in.
Here’s a quick visual of the landscape (web traffic, not mobile or email):
Legend
- Low Intent – Undirected traffic, neither commercially or transactionally
- High Intent – Highly engaged traffic, users with something specific on their mind
- High Quality – Brand safe traffic, high transactional quotient
- Low Quality – Brand unsafe, low transactional quotient and/or ability
Intent is all about the topic. Quality is all about the desirability of the audience.
Low intent is not inherently bad. It is simply people in situations where they aren’t actively searching. But, it doesn’t mean they can’t be high quality. A lot of display traffic can be low-intent but the audience is comprised of people who are clickers and converts. The "crap" in this case is not an intent issue. It’s a quality issue. Crap comes in all types of content and intent. We think of a site like Google’s own search pages as one standard of good traffic. It is high intent traffic. Then again porn is pretty high intent traffic as well. So what separates the two? Distilled, the difference comes down to the ability to monetize one versus the other. That’s at the heart of "quality." Amazon is the easiest example of quality. Although not an ad supported play, the vast majority of its traffic goes there for very specific reasons and they do so in order to transact. On the ad side, quality doesn’t mean an audience who will always convert. It can simply reflect desirability – a large number of advertisers for whom that traffic would produce the desired results of either branding or performance.
If we were to overlay the performance marketing world’s traffic distribution on top of this chart, where it gets interesting is if we were to look at it over time. The trend we fight as performance marketers is being squeezed out of the higher quality traffic. Google, Facebook, et al, are all open to performance marketers at first, but once they have their own critical mass, they no longer need / want a majority of the performance guys. When that happens, it is literally and figuratively another type of race to the bottom. The appetite to make money doesn’t go away, but the ease with which it can be made is not there. Instead of having access to the higher quality traffic, we are left with free reign of below the line inventory.
It’s a really difficult situation. There is a belief that there is an ad for every impression. We know for example that some very well to do and desirable people visit some less than work safe sites. In theory, with targeting, you would know this person has the attributes you want and could serve them an ad that matches who they are instead of who the content is. But, there is a limit. Content and context still matter, so even if you could find some of the most affluent people on less than savory sites, no advertiser would let you show their ad there. And while the user might be a high value person on another site, the overall infrequency of such quality visitors makes the site itself still unmonetizable.
Many a company has done a fine job at monetizing the unmonetizable, but doing so means being realistic about your business. Those sites are below the line for a reason. You can force their attention into an ad environment, especially in some of the higher intent areas, but getting their attention and getting them to convert doesn’t equal quality. It can mean money, but inherently not long-term money.
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