Comments on: Can news websites achieve Google-size ad revenue?

By: Olav A

Olav A — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 15:16:06 +0000

Thanks a lot to both of you! Kristine, does comScore look at “Google clickers” specifically? I would expect that those clicking on Google ads are “higher quality”, otherwise fewer advertisers would buy AdWords ads, right?

By: Scott Bateman

Scott Bateman — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 22:05:02 +0000

Newspapers already offer CPC campaigns to advertising clients. They just don’t work as well as Google ads because newspaper sites don’t have the same level of technology that can produce the same results.

Cost per thousand impression (CPM) works best for visual, branding-oriented campaigns while CPC is best for textual, response-oriented campaigns.

Google produces more revenue because it redistributes its ads on other Web sites (AdSense), which newspapers can’t do, and because it can deliver contextual ads, which newspapers are starting to do.

By: Kristine

Kristine — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 19:47:50 +0000

One major problem with CPC though: those who click on ads are not always representative of the pupulation at large, check out this piece on a recent study of “online clickers”. Getting lots of clicks on an ad is one thing, but getting the right clicks can be a challenge:

http://virtualeconomics.typepad.com/virtualeconomics/2008/02/only-half-part.html

Higlight: “according to the latest comScore study, about 50% of ad clicks are carried out by the same 6% of the online audience, a core of heavy clickers. This accords with an older AOL study that found 99% of web users did not click on an ad in a given month.

“Even more interestingly, it reached the same demographic conclusion: that the clickers are not representative of the online population as a whole but represent households with an age profile between 25-44 with an income of $40,000.”