Display advertising, Video in display, Pre & Post-roll Video and Overlays, Expanding ads, Audio Ads, and now Lead Generation ads are being touted as the savior of Online Advertising in an article on Forbes.Com titled "What Advertisers Will Pay For On News Sites"...
"Figuring out whether publishers would be better off selling simple impressions or collecting leads is tricky. For premier publishers like New York Times Co. ( NYT - news - people ) flagship site Nytimes.com or News Corp. ( NWS - news - people ) property WSJ.com, prices for ads sold by a human salesman can exceed $25 per thousand impressions. Yet most publishers can't sell all their ads through personal relationships and often turn to ad networks or exchanges to find advertisers.
Prices on news sites for ads sold by such brokers are typically tiny: around 35 cents per thousand impressions at year-end 2008, according to Pubmatic, a Silicon Valley firm that helps publishers earn the maximum revenue for their ad inventory.
With so little revenue coming from many standard ads, publishers may consider trying to run lead collection campaigns instead. A key variable in this strategy is the publisher's ability to convince readers to turn over their personal information in forms or surveys. Lasker says response rates vary wildly, from 0.25% to 15%.
If publishers assume they will collect leads at the low end of that range--meaning that for every thousand people that see a survey opportunity, 2.5 people actually fill it out--Pontiflex's average lead price of $2.27 would translate to $5.68 in revenue per thousand ads served, or 16 times the price garnered by ads sold on networks."
Not everyone agrees with the strategy....
"certain publishers will disagree that the future business model for digital media is selling direct access to users. The New York Times has been increasing the value of its digital impressions to advertisers by adding interactive features to ads and weaving editorial content into marketing messages"
Jim Spanfeller, the outgoing chief executive of this Web site, published an essay Monday on digital media news site Paidcontent.com arguing that publishers should set higher ad prices, crack down on resellers who peddle cheap ads and focus on selling expensive brand-building campaigns, as opposed to direct marketing products like sales leads.
No one knows which model will dominate the monetization of professional content. But with publishers struggling to justify the cost of creating content and competition for user attention growing ever more intense, advertisers and Web users should expect a lot of advertising experimentation."
I believe that what is right for the clients needs and objectives is what we should develop and sell back to them based on what can be delivered. The argument shouldn't be about what method is "THE" method, instead our focus needs to be delivering a return on the interactive investment through the most beneficial platforms we can
deliver it through.