Media Tech Business

Several years ago I started a list of alternative terms for online ad inventory that I used in presentations when we first introduced the Right Media Exchange. It was part of a larger effort to persuade publishers to think about the importance of having a real strategy for non-premium inventory.

It was simple when the world of website ad inventory was divided between premium and non-premium. The language has evolved tortuously to fulfill the industry’s impulse to redefine anything simple so that it appears to be much more complex and, therefore, presumably, more valuable.

The online advertising ecosystem now includes ad exchanges and marketplaces, yield optimizers and creative optimizers, buy-side platforms and data exchanges, and numerous intermediaries who serve other intermediaries. Not content to feed from the existing language pool, each new organism in the ecosystem spawns its own new language, better to describe why it deserves greater prominence.

A notable coinage used by William Morrison and Robert Coolbrith of ThinkEquity in their excellent report, “The Opportunity in Non-Premium DisplayAdvertising,” inserts a new layer of website ad inventory called “secondary premium.” This strikes me as a rate card distinction, not some previously undiscovered form of inventory found living in the cracks between premium and non-premium. Here’s the ThinkEquity view:

By any name, there’s no denying that publishers are creating more and more inventory that they can’t monetize easily without a lot of help from networks, ad exchanges, and yield optimizers. One of the latter group, PubMatic. has introduced “2nd Channel,” which I believe nicely encompasses and describes anything that isn’t in the premium sales team’s sweet spot. (Disclosure: I’ve consulted for PubMatic.) Here’s the rest of the lineup, organized roughly according to the context in which the terms are typically used:

A non-premium display ad by any other name? 2nd Channel

This is pretty subjective, of course. I’d love to see a neat, descriptive term such as “2nd Channel” replace the mish-mash of differences without distinction represented by the list in the right-hand column. Keep it simple, and focus on the goals of improving user experience, advertiser performance, and publisher yield.

Tags: Ad Inventory, Ad Networks, Ad Sales, Ad Serving, Digital Publishing, Language, Media Exchange, Monetization // 3 Comments »