Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
Time Merges Print and Digital Sales
AdAge reports that Time is fusing the mighty forces of its print and digital corporate sales, the two units that handle the media giant’s biggest advertisers. Assuming the wheel of the hybrid vehicle is Leslie Picard, previously the president of corporate sales and marketing. Exiting stage right is longtime digital president Kirk McDonald, though Time says the timing of his departure is incidental. This is the latest corporate restructuring since Jack Griffin jumped into the CEO chair last fall. Read the full AdAge report here.
Mobile Gaming Ad Revenue
Mobile gaming keeps leaping in popularity – 95 million U.S. mobile users, 36% of the mobile population, will be gamers in 2014 — but ad revenue for mobile gaming is dwarfed by the revenue from user payments, and will continue to be for some time. According to Juniper Research, the $87 million marketers spent on ads in mobile games worldwide in 2010 will grow tenfold by 2015 to $894 million. While the pace of growth is steeper than revenue from user payments, that $894 million still only one-tenth of the revenue coming directly from user payments. In the U.S., eMarketer expects in-game mobile advertising revenue to increase from $55.5 million in 2010 to $185.9 million in 2014, but even then it will only drive 12.3% of mobile gaming revenue, with user payments accounting for $1.328 billion of the $1.5 billion industry. Read the full article at eMarketer.
Multi-Touch Attribution
Last click? Last view? So outdated — This is the year everybody in the purchase funnel gets the attribution they deserve, or at least a close approximation. At ClickZ, Turn Chief Technology Officer Xuhui Shao describes a multi-touch attribution system that uses a probability model similar to a predictive model to weigh the influence of “all interactions within an association window” toward a conversion — each factor either raises or lowers the probability of conversion. Not only is this handy in retroactive reporting, it also offers proactive analysis: “the user in each ad call can be scored based on previous behavior and touch points,” Xuhui writes. Read the full article at ClickZ.
Anita Loos wrote back in 1925 that “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” – however, the sequel was titled “But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes.” We’re uncertain how many actual gentlemen have OKCupid profiles (OKCupid is a social dating site the young people like) but the boys on the site do spend a disproportionate amount of time on the site ogling and messaging pretty girls, according to a blog by Christian Rudder. Click here to see all the math behind the OKCupid findings.
Write Now
The deadline to submit feedback to the Federal Trade Commission regarding its proposed Do-Not-Track system is fast approaching and you’re reading random industry coverge? Look, you don’t even have to mail the commentary yourself – you can just send your piece of mind of to those fine folks at ClickZ, but they want it by Jan. 15. Why aren’t you organizing your thoughts into coherent answers for at least one of the 11 questions laid out by the FTC? Or are you just going to turn in some half-baked comment about stifling competition? BORING! Snap to it, and get your opinion in ClickZ’s mailbag.
Value of a Visitor
Are all visitors valued equally? Not by a long shot – turns out uniques on different tech giants are worth substantially different amounts. Dividing year-end revenue by unique visitors over the year, Silicon Alley Insider discovered that Amazon users are the most expensive, with each worth $189, followed by eBay with a $39 user valuation. Oh, and at $24 per user, Google visitors are worth six times as much as Facebook visitors ($4). Sheesh, even Yahoo users are worth twice as much. See the stats at Silicon Alley Insider, but know that we consider every AdExchanger reader invaluable.
Metric Triumvirate
You digital publishers want revenue optimization? Matt Shanahan at Scout Analytics has got three metrics for ya: revenue capacity (number of impressions for sales on a monthly basis), load (percentage of impressions sold) and yield (average revenue per impression). “The difference between publishers guessing vs. managing their revenue is the ability to understand the distribution of their impressions and correlate that revenue capacity to the load and yield of their advertising.” Sound simple? No? Well then, you should probably read the full post on the Scout Analytics blog.
Launch Like You Experiment
Man, it seems like those Google guys do everything better, even managing multiple experiments and launching new features. Former Amazon exec and Findory.com founder Greg Linden analyzes a recent presentation from four Googlers and is impressed that the process of launching new components is exactly like the experimentation process. “It creates a culture where every change to be launched needs to be tested online and experiments are not treated so much as tests to be taken down when done as candidates to be sent out live as soon as they prove themselves,” he muses. Read the full post at Linden’s blog.
Casale Shines Through Nielsen PRIZM
Casale Media is bringing the flavor of offline targeting to its client base by offering Nielsen PRIZM Digital, Nielsen’s segmentation system that sorts U.S. households into demographics lifestyles, shopping patterns, financial wealth and tech preferences. Those lucky Casale platform users will just be swimming in offline audience data as they get access to syndicated survey results and consumer demand data sourced by Nielsen and 30 other consumer research firms. Read the full press release here.
