Joel Comm
05-08-2006, 02:18 PM
Recently, I wrote about the importance of Smart Pricing. I pointed out that while we don’t know how exactly it works, we do know that it’s something we have to pay attention to.
Well, the forums have been buzzing in the last few days with news of YPN’s version of traffic quality control: they cut off users who were marketing their ads on MySpace.
There are a couple of things to mention here.
The first is that even when tossing off publishers, YPN did it with a lighter touch than Google. They gave their publishers a few days notice, letting them replace their ads without losing revenue, and they contacted them directly explaining why they were doing it. It would be nice if that sort of service keeps up when they come out of Beta.
The second point though concerns MySpace as a source of traffic. For a professional publisher, a network with 65 million users sounds like an unmissable source. The fact that you can put ads on your profile, paste in your blog posts and make some extra cash out of the content you’re producing anyway just sounds very tempting.
But I can understand that advertisers of mortgage loans or life insurance policies aren’t going to be too happy about receiving -- and paying for -- clicks from 16-year olds looking for dates. That’s why I think that if you are going to use MySpace to generate clicks, you have to do it cleverly.
There are lots of groups at MySpace with interests that go beyond boy bands and rap stars. Some of them focus on various aspects of business, for example. It might be worth trying to siphon off some of the users in those groups not to your MySpace ads, but to one of your other sites. Users who are prepared to leave MySpace to gather information are more likely to have a genuine interest in the content and make advertisers happy. And they’re no longer looking just to socialize too.
The way things stand now, if you’re a YPN advertiser, you should avoid MySpace like the plague. Whether Google decides to follow YPN’s lead and cut MySpace out too is likely to depend on how the figures work. The problem though is that AdSense publishers are going to be very cautious about trying to make it work when they know that Google could end up either hitting their Smart Pricing -- or cutting them off altogether. That’s just a waste of MySpace.
Well, the forums have been buzzing in the last few days with news of YPN’s version of traffic quality control: they cut off users who were marketing their ads on MySpace.
There are a couple of things to mention here.
The first is that even when tossing off publishers, YPN did it with a lighter touch than Google. They gave their publishers a few days notice, letting them replace their ads without losing revenue, and they contacted them directly explaining why they were doing it. It would be nice if that sort of service keeps up when they come out of Beta.
The second point though concerns MySpace as a source of traffic. For a professional publisher, a network with 65 million users sounds like an unmissable source. The fact that you can put ads on your profile, paste in your blog posts and make some extra cash out of the content you’re producing anyway just sounds very tempting.
But I can understand that advertisers of mortgage loans or life insurance policies aren’t going to be too happy about receiving -- and paying for -- clicks from 16-year olds looking for dates. That’s why I think that if you are going to use MySpace to generate clicks, you have to do it cleverly.
There are lots of groups at MySpace with interests that go beyond boy bands and rap stars. Some of them focus on various aspects of business, for example. It might be worth trying to siphon off some of the users in those groups not to your MySpace ads, but to one of your other sites. Users who are prepared to leave MySpace to gather information are more likely to have a genuine interest in the content and make advertisers happy. And they’re no longer looking just to socialize too.
The way things stand now, if you’re a YPN advertiser, you should avoid MySpace like the plague. Whether Google decides to follow YPN’s lead and cut MySpace out too is likely to depend on how the figures work. The problem though is that AdSense publishers are going to be very cautious about trying to make it work when they know that Google could end up either hitting their Smart Pricing -- or cutting them off altogether. That’s just a waste of MySpace.