Right to reply: Ad networks and publishers

Austen Kay’s comments on why ad networks don’t care about their publishers may be true of some ad networks but certainly not all. Saying that ‘ad networks don’t value smaller publishers at all’ is simply not true. Businesses like OTPmedia were founded on the principal of their customer service and the fact that we do care about our publishers. 

I would agree that some networks may be completely advertiser focussed but these are the ones with thousands of websites who would not notice if a publisher suddenly stopped using them, the long tail, they quite simply are not geared to manage anything other than network CPM rates often generated from CPC or CPA campaigns.

However there are sales houses with a network who ARE geared to do both, the open networks like OTPmedia who lead sales efforts with a publisher as opposed to leading as a reach network. All of our premium sites are represented on an individual basis to the planners on their own brand and merits, we are not a blind network so you can pick and choose where your campaign goes and we value our quality premium publishers extremely highly.

Networks like OTPmedia are already vertically focussed and using behavioural and other targeting techniques to constantly refine publishers offerings including tagging sites accordingly to try buck the trend in the fall in CPM’s and the drive towards performance – because they do care about their publishers. The department that ad networks like us are growing the fastest to manage this new market is operations.

With any publisher the campaign has to work, many campaigns are now performance measured and unfortunately if a site does not perform then planners understandably will want to place their spend elsewhere.

The core problem is the limited amount of quality inventory available to the networks, a publisher with quality content does not need to care about the ad networks. A publisher with poor quality content might well feel an ad network does not care, and they may be right, if a site is not premium or the performance metrics are poor they may well be better off in a blind network.

By Ian Woolley
Managing Director
OTPmedia