The Changing Performance Landscape – A Retrospective

The press, the VC money, all of it has seemingly followed the rise of social media sites. Interestingly enough, though, the largest of the Internet advertising shows seems to have the least representation from the companies that have captured the buzz. In many ways, it seems counterintuitive that these companies would not make themselves known at Ad:Tech four weeks ago, especially considering that these same sites that seem to encapsulate the zeitgeist of this Bubble 2.0 owe their existence to the rise in the Internet advertising economy. You would think that the companies who need the advertising the most for their businesses to survive would use some of their funding to make a splash at the Super Bowl of Internet advertising conferences. Instead, these Web 2.0 companies choose to present at shows where only their peers, the other technology driven, at some point in time advertising supported sites, do. If I ran a site whose business model got funded because it would make money via advertising when the time came, I’d make sure to make myself known where the advertisers gather. Instead of the next best things before, during, and/or after Facebook battling it out at Ad:Tech New York, we had a different type of showdown, or at least showcase, CPA Networks.

Somewhere around five years ago, the landscape of Ad:Tech looked quite different. As we’ve certainly remarked on many times before, during the early 2000’s, search management companies and the Tier 2,3, and 4 search engines seemed to own much of the of the tradeshow floor. These were entities that focused on helping advertisers get their message into the next frontier of online advertising, search. At that time, Google existed as a consumer destination site but didn’t have an advertising program. Hard to believe but most of the companies either focused on paid inclusion instead of paid search; those that did focus on paid search had straightforward applications that catered to getting advertisers a certain position. They ranked among only a handful that made the paid search landscape their core business, and it made sense because the paid search landscape encompassed many consumer facing brands but only Overture when it came to real distribution. That certainly started to change as Google showed that another company could enter the arena and build an advertiser base, which included in the presentation ranks a din of companies to help manage rank across them.

This is old news now, but Google single-handedly altered the landscape of Internet advertising, from cleaning up the glut of companies focusing on position to paving the way for Bubble 1.0 models, i.e. focusing on users not money. With Google’s AdSense, along with equally changes in the hard costs to run a site, it seemed that anyone could make enough money if they had enough users. Just because a site has some users doesn’t mean that it has a clear value to advertisers. Walking around Ad:Tech this year, it seemed that the number of performance based companies popped up in response to the ambiguity from the user-only sites. Not only that, but it seems that the performance-focused companies serve another purpose as well, to provide an alternative to the ever competitive and confusing landscape of search. In some ways, it feels like today’s CPA networks are 2002’s search placement – both paid inclusion and sponsored listing – alternatives. What it means is that they are focused on the right thing but that when we walk the show floor three years from now, only a handful will still exist in the form they are today.

In addition to CPA Networks, ad networks had a large presence on this year’s floor, those left anyway. They’ve received more than enough of their share of press, including the most recent announcement that Fox Interactive Media looks to follow in the footsteps of AOL, Yahoo, and MSN in becoming an ad network and not just an interface for its internally owned properties. Like the CPA Networks, the increasing prominence of ad networks, which have always had a dominant presence at Ad:Tech, stems from the ever confusing and fragmented nature of the ad landscape. We can infer from the CPA Networks and ad networks higher profile and quantity that the ad landscape has become more confusing not less over the years. And, if previous years tell us anything, this confusion and lack of a clear winner in solving it means that we can expect some potentially turbulent times ahead. The ad network landscape will change but less so than the CPA one as fewer players exist. Its increased attention implies that sites continue and will continue to need outside help in monetizing. It’s as though they are prepping for an upcoming inventory war to mirror the homes that might be dumped on the housing market.

The CPA landscape doesn’t indicate supply or demand on a website like ad networks do, but its incredible fragmentation and lack of differentiation means the landscape will shift primarily because there are too many players offering a service seemingly indistinguishable from an ad buyers perspective. That’s why today’s CPA networks look and act like the paid search placement firms from 2002. – instead of a company saying we can get you position one or two when you want, you have companies saying they will get conversions when you want. Number of booths aside, the reason today’s CPA networks are yesterday’s placement focused search companies is that they don’t own distribution. They simply offer a service. Luckily for all of us in this area, even though Google owns the distribution, the complexity of their system still makes it such that advertisers will seek out and want expertise. As for the future of the CPA Network, the lack of differentiation (in the eyes of advertisers) and their role as service provider not traffic owner means that this years abundance of CPA Networks doesn’t signal their arrival, but the arrival of performance marketing. It’s going to be an interesting next couple of years as performance marketing undergoes the same consolidation and shakeup that search and the ad network landscape has.