Two Ways to Skin a Cat
When we came across the profile site featured in on our other articles, we couldn’t help but find ourselves fascinated with the ads that ran on it and its counterparts. Trying to navigate the world of display,though, especially on the long-tail of content sites, means putting up with a high signal to noise ratio. Unlike a Yahoo or MSN where there exists a finite and manageable amount of ad units, on these sites, one page scrolls on seemingly as long as a bad direct marketing site, filled with ad unit after unit from every imaginable network. The problem isn’t just the clutter from all the ads, it’s the previously mentioned habit of ad networks not always showing the right ad to the right site. On decidedly low-brow sites with a subpar audience, you can still find branded ads showing; again not as a direct result of their working with the brands but due to the inventory imbalances where networks do what any network has done and blend traffic. Filtering that out, we find ourselves left with two distinct type of ads – the sales driven machine and the performance-driven one. Both show up on our long-tail site, but they couldn’t represent further methods for monetization.
The Sales Driven Machine
Calling sales an important piece to any ad product doesn’t really say much. The distinction between the sales-driven product and the performance-based one has little to do with whether the companies receive their dollars from external advertisers. It has everything to do with the process by which they obtain theses advertisers and who they target as advertisers. Each organization has sales people, but the sales people in a sales based company focus on the online equivalent of big game hunting – branding dollars.
Display ad networks fall somewhere in between. They have branded dollars, but that happens more out of their scale than their ability to achieve the function desired by the brand’s steward. The classic example of the sales-machine are the niche players, like Nabbr. It’s a fantastic play in hype. The advertiser pitch goes like this, "Top record labels, TV networks and movie studios use Nabbr to reach millions of Gen Y users on the social web instantly. Want to promote your premium content? See what Nabbr can do for your campaign." While the publisher pitch says, "Nabbr’s network includes hundreds of the most trafficked sites on the social web. Got a hot site? Find out how you can join our Nabbr network." Given their example site is barely a step up from the profile pimp page we saw, we know it’s not the quality of their content making the difference, it’s all in the ability to convince advertisers.
Convince advertisers, Nabbr seems to do. Their ad unit is a combination of pay for play premium made for web content, videos, and more. It’s a great approach for sites to give up space, because while they show ads, the unit appears more content than pure ads. And, their pitch is perfect for those with a marketing budget but who want to be able to tell a story of performance, in this case views. Never mind that most are auto-play and can sit below the fold and next to any number of other ads. And, some of the content comes with its own ads that definitely don’t fit the content or the audience. In sum, Nabbr might reach Gen Y as they say, but it’s success is purely due to its sales.
The Performance-Driven Machine
For all the glamor of the sales-driven life on screen, the day to day life is tough and anything like that of the performance-based life where people are empowered and as though they have control over their destiny. Nowhere is that more evident than in an ad that would make for a great starting point for any classic arbitrager looking to expand into advertising. It’s the type of ad that makes you say if this can run, then almost anything can.
There are just as many if not more casual game visitors as profile page visitors, so it’s not surprising that ads for games makes sense, and the product doesn’t have to entail the complexity of GameVance who just kills it advertising on these sites. As you can see from the landing page above, it’s a pretty straight forward reg-path that ends up leveraging how money is really made on most of the advertising – mobile. Much of the reg path is really window dressing for the step that matters to them, obtaining the cell phone number, which just so happens to be one of the required fields (below). Once completed, the user will see mobile offer after mobile offer. And, despite how it might look or function, the advertiser’s here wouldn’t be if it didn’t perform.
Perhaps the true beauty lies in its wonderful deceptiveness. Make it through their reg-path without opting in, and the final page is your "free" games, which given the lack of disclosures on the landing page was surprising but given the company we keep ultimately more clever than surprising. The free is nothing but a link for an incentive promotion site. Why give something away when you can turn it into a CPA? Sounds almost like a tag line for performance-marketing.
