Every content network has walked this rope at least once – ad inventory optimization. Direct sales team can only sell 40-50% of your ad inventory at any given time. The rest is filled with different ad networks, big and small. The math is very simple; push those ad networks which pay you higher CPM all the time. However, the truth is, no single ad network pays highest CPM all the time. It varies a lot depending on geography, time, page/site context, readers, etc. And to top it all, with strict frequency capping and default ads deployed, ad networks leave you playing with pennies.

Indirect sales can result in 30-40% of total ad revenue for any mid-size to large publisher. Today, for any smart publisher it’s must to optimize their indirect sales channel to boost the revenue. This becomes more challenging as almost all ad networks are closed wall and have not (neither have intentions to) come out with APIs giving power to publishers.

Frequency capping
According to Wikipedia, Frequency capping is a term in advertising that means restricting (capping) the amount of times (frequency) a specific visitor to a website is shown a particular advertisement. This restriction applies to all websites that serve ads from the same advertising network.

In a competitive market where marketers are demanding more accountability, it’s obvious that ad networks have to optimize their ad delivery to boost CTR. However, this turns the balance in favor of ad networks. Publishers have little or no insight of how the pricing is structured for low CPM ads, and it converts into revenue loss.

Defaults
Nothing frustrates publishers more than defaults. Just like it’s impossible for you to sell your 100% ad inventory in direct sales, so is for the ad networks as well. Even Google Adsense, which today has the biggest pool of advertisers, can fill your ad inventory up to a certain limit.

Most ad networks allow you to specify tags from different ad networks to serve ads in case they don’t have any for your users. Publishers deploy static chains of ad networks pushing ads from other ad networks in case one defaults. These static chains are cumbersome to deploy or change. Publishers have no or little power to use their real time data to modify the chain whenever they want.

Some ad optimization networks like Pubmatic are offering dynamic daisy chains to publishers where default ad impressions are collected and then routed to the highest paying ad network.

Real time optimization
“Yesterday’s home runs don’t win today’s games.” Babe Ruth

The goal of optimization is to maximize the yield of ad networks in real time. As pointed out earlier, this becomes daunting as ad networks are not ready to come out with their APIs. Yes, even the self-proclaimed “Don’t be Evil” giant shield its Adsense reports behind its own walls. You need either some grease-monkey script or advance data mining techniques to get into their systems and let you evaluate their performance based on CPM, click-through, conversions, defaults, etc. in real time and serve ads from best performing ad network for that case.

Segmentation
This for once, I will admit, Adsense is much better than any other ad network. They let you segment your ad zones very precisely. Their multiple-channel and url-channel tracking put publisher in driving seats; helping him optimize his inventory to any level. But again, the real challenge is to optimize Adsense with other ad newtorks and push an ad network only if it’s supposed to yield maximum output.

Ad optimization networks like Yield Build and Pubmatic helps you to some extent, but they are also tied with few ad networks only. Moreover, their system is best build for publishers doing 25 million and above pageviews per month leaving out small to mid-size publishers.

Monetizing international traffic is also a gem in the rough. Identify top countries sending you traffic and tie up with local ad networks to serve ads in those regions. No matter how good your current sets of ad networks are, they can never beat the local players.

Website targeting v/s page targeting – It’s no brainer that niche verticals pays you higher CPM (no I am not talking about sites dedicated to celebs). Every ad network identifies the page it’s serving ads on basis of context of the page, website or the user its showing ads for. If you have a large website divided into different channels, it’s worth finding out which ad networks are performing best of which sections or channels. Targeting the ad networks to the niche group will be instrumental in pulling higher eCPM than large, broad and general segment.

Short tail vs long tail
Thanks to Internet, today, life cycle of a content piece is more than few days. A content piece can continue to make money for anything between 12-18 months even after it’s published. Many contextual ad networks performed (both in terms of CPM and CTR) much better than others when they receive traffic from search engines or various links pointing to your site.

Control

Who has the control between you and networks? Irrespective of what your account manager has told you, the truth is that you are standing on sidelines. Remember, no APIs means no control. If you really want to be in driving seat, you need to crash their ad network walls and get the reports in real time and make them compete with each other for every single ad impression.

Deploying an ad optimization engine is like passing away your control from one demon to another. This needs to be an in-house deployment giving you powers to tweak even the smallest things.

Not defying the credentials of Ad Optimization Networks
By voicing out these points, I am not defying the credentials of the already running ad-optimization platforms, if they work well for you nothing like that, I have heard great stories from people who use them but as the saying goes, one size never fits for all.

Disclaimer: At Instablogs, we are also working on our ad-optimization engine to help maximize our revenue.

In my recent visit to Vienna, met a lot of interesting people from Norway. My initial impression of Norway’s online market was that of a small and passive market with few clones of popular global sites like Facebook, Digg, Craigslist catering to the local audience. But after interacting with my Norwegian friends, I realized not only Norway has a mature online marketplace but have aggressive online players pushing for audience share. Norway also has one of the highest ad spend per user of around US$207.

Comparison with US

The market size both in terms of online users and advertisement of Norway is extremely small in comparison, and one might dismiss it at a single glance. But on analyzing it closely, one can see few brownies embedded here and there.

Strong online presence by newspapers

While in most other countries newspapers take away very little share of total online time spent, Norwegian story is entirely different. Top newspapers sites of Norway like Vg.no, Dagbladet.no , Nettavisen.no, e24.no, Aftenposten.no etc constitutes a huge portion of total online spent by Norwegian users. Norwegian newspapers have been extremely aggressive from pre-Google era in building their online presence. Dagbladet.no and Startsiden have been publishing news online from early 1995 and 1996 respectively.

Norway also has the highest newspaper readership in the world and most of its top online media properties are owned by big media players like Schibsted, Eddy Media etc giving them ample space to push content to their existing offline readers.

Top online sites in Norway

VG Nett
Online site charges around $30,000 for a day long banner on its homepage – which is more than a full-page color ad in its printed paper.

E24
Launched in mid 2006, the site started making serious money within few weeks. Today it makes more than $5million from only banner sales.

Finn.no
Popular Norwegian classified portal generates as much as 30-35% of revenue that its parent company Schibsted does from its offline channel, but profit margin is around 65% high.

Design

One unique aspect of most of the sites in Norway is their use of big pictures, bold headlines and long pages. In average it will take 7-10 scroll to reach bottom of the page. Mobile sites are also very functional, maybe because Norway is the birth place of Nokia.

Counterparts of popular global sites in Norwegian

1. Facebook, Myspace
Nettby, founded in late 2006 is the second largest Internet-based community in Norway (after Facebook) with more than 1 million users and profiles.

2. Digg
MSN Reporter was launched only in three markets, the Netherlands, Belgium and Norway. MSN Reporter more or less works like Digg where news gets promoted to the frontpage via ‘Diggs’. On MSN Reporter you have to “Kick” or “Dump” an article. But, unlike Digg, you do not need to be registered with MSN Reporter to start voting.

3. Yahoo
There are numerous portal trying the Yahoo act, but the most closest is Startsiden.

4. News aggregator
Overblikk

5. Craigslist
Finn

6. Weather Channel
Yr.no

7. Blogger/Wordpress
blogg.no

Ad Networks

Since most of the large media sites are owned by big media houses, these sites employ their direct market sales team. But few ad networks have been successful for catering to small to medium sites or filling up unsold inventories for big groups. Adpower.no owned by Edda Media, powers over 50 publishers and is a leader in the contextual space (after Google) in Norway. Another company NetAd SA was acquired by Germany’s 1&1 Ad Network.

All in all Norway has a small but mature online ad market. For a foreign publisher to establish itself will mean taking away share from already present media sites. Most of the big sites targets a general audience and there is definitely room for niche verticals.

This list is entirely based on my personal experience, and can vary according to your spouse or girlfriend. So no guarantee that your geek wife would be as geeky as mine, but I can assure you that you will definitely have lots of fun having one.

10. She is smart.

She will always have some interesting news, which you have missed. Your conversations can be long and interesting, and you can talk about WoW, Jedis, Diggers,web two-oh, and the new Star Trek Movie.

9. Can be easily motivated to turn their hobbies into full blown cash machine.

For example, if she likes shopping (name a girl who doesn’t) she can be be easily convinced and motivate to build a blog/site/portal around it. And you be assured that she will leave no stone unturned to convert it into a financial hub.

8. You can distract her easily in fights

Whenever you get into a fight, you can start talking about latest trends, technology and all other geeky stuff. She will in no time, will either start searching for it on her iPhone or on the next closest workstation in her vicinity; completely forgetting the reason why the fight started.

7. Great sense of humor

Geeks are witty and have a great sense of humor. She can make techie jokes around everything. Being around a geek is always fun.

6. Geeks are excellent parents.

Firstly because your geeky wife will pass her “smart genes” to your kid. Secondly she is always innovative in raising her. So don’t be surpised to see your 18 months old kid handling iPhone or your laptop perfectly.

5. New ways to communicate.

You will always have a new way to communicate with her; Gtalk, Twitter, Facebook, SMS, Email. So there will never be an communication issue.

4. Engaging

Geeks can be engaged in meanigful discussion like why Star Trek themed Home Theater is better than Terminator themed home theater. They will always have enough information to discuss on most of the stuff relevant to you.

3. Movies.

You can watch Transformers, Ocean Series, Simpsons with her anyday. You can even watch Star Trek and Star Wars multiple times without being called out childish.

2. She knows technology.

She will spends hours with you unlocking and jailbreaking the new iPhone version and enjoy every moment of it.

1. She is respected in the community

She will be interviewed and acknowledged by her peers and will occasionally win few awards for her work and knowledge. You will share some of her accolades as being identified as their better half.

In nearby South Korea, also waiting for Apple’s iPhone, in a recent survey of 590 South Korean CEOs conducted by the Samsung Ecomonic Research Institute, they chose from amongst the list of devices included in Time Magazine’s “Inventions of 2007″ report Apple’s iPhone as the most inspirational device, indicating that in South Korea, as in Japan, there is a great deal of expectations for this device. Having said that, the rest of the Time Magazine inventions were rather samey, with the only other device catching my eye being a lightweight remote-control FlyTech Dragonfly ornithopter.