All of this represents an amazing opportunity and an incredible challenge to news organisations who want to engage with their audience and generate revenue to fund their journalism.

As the mobile phone has become the primary means of accessing information, entertainment and socialising for billions of people, mobile advertising has become the primary means of remuneration for content owners.

In many countries, mobile advertising is a mature industry.  No longer the preserve of dubious links offering “Free Crazy Frog Ringtones!!” – mobile advertising is used by global and local brands to drive engagement with users.  If it’s still in its infancy in your country, it won’t be for long. It offers a credible and sustainable way for media organisations to produce their content at no direct cost to their users.

In the old-fashioned days of advertising, every newspaper would have an ad-sales desk.  Hordes of salesmen (and it was nearly always men in my experience) would shout down the phones trying to convince companies to buy a quarter-page advert in the weekend edition.

All that has changed.  Rather than employing sales people to negotiate directly with potential advertisers, most mobile sites use an Advertising Network.

Understanding ad networks

Ad networks are really simple to understand.

• A business owner creates a space for advertising on their mobile site (or app).  This is called a “slot”.
• The advertising network analyses the content on the page and the people who are visiting it.
• The advertising network then conducts real-time bidding among the advertisers.  It looks through all the adverts that it has on its books, matches up the adverts that it thinks will get a high rate of engagement, then sees which company is willing to pay the most to be shown at that specific time, on that specific page, to that specific user.
• The advert is then shown to the user in the page’s slot.

All of this happens in just a few milliseconds.

Getting paid

Broadly speaking, there are three ways that mobile adverts make money for content owners: CPM, CPC and CPE.

CPM – Cost Per Mille is the most “traditional” way of advertising.  It is also the least profitable and is falling out of favour.  It simply measures how many times the advert is shown to a user.  For every thousand (mille) impressions a fixed sum is paid.

CPC – Cost Per Click is the most common way of measuring mobile advertising.  Whenever a user clicks on a mobile advert, a variable sum of money is paid out.  Depending on the advertiser, and the market, this can be anywhere from a tenth of cent to a dollar.

In some cases, the advertising network will track whether the user went on to purchase a product or install an app based on clicking an advert – if so, it will pay out more money to the content owner.

CPE – Cost Per Engagement is the newest – and potentially most profitable – method of mobile advertising.

Using HTML5 – the latest version of the code that creates web content – it is possible to create interactive adverts which don’t result in the user leaving the site.  For example, clicking on an advert could play a trailer for a movie.  In this case, the advertising network pays out every time a user engages with an advert.

Mobile advertising networks

There are dozens of mobile advertising networks available.  The industry is still relatively young and contains many companies which have grown rapidly in just a few years.

When choosing a mobile advertising network, be sure that the company has an account manager located in the same country as you, and also ensure that they have sales teams in the countries you wish to target your content.  Finally, make sure they support the platforms that you are currently on – and those to which you wish to expand.  For example, you may be mobile web only now, but do you have plans for an Android app?

While there are hundreds of mobile advertising networks (http://mobithinking.com/mobile-ad-network-guide), there are a few major players.

InMobi

InMobi started in Bangalore, India, and has rapidly expanded into Russia, Asia, Africa and Europe.  They support mobile web, Android, iPhone, and Windows 8. The author is a former employee of InMobi.

Google AdMob

Google is well established in the mobile advertising world.  AdMob will only work on SmartPhone apps – it will not work on mobile websites.

Google AdSense

Google’s AdSense platform allows publishers to monetize mobile websites.  If you already use AdSense for Web, you will be familiar with its layout and how it works.

Amobee

With offices from Buenos Aires to Singapore, Amobee is well placed to integrate with a variety of mobile devices in a wide range of markets.

BuzzCity

Specialising in Asia and Africa, BuzzCity is serving billions of mobile adverts every month.  It can target mobile web, Android, and iOS – as well as older devices such as BlackBerry and J2ME.

Hunt

Dedicated to the Latin American market, Hunt has seen huge growth over the last few years.  It can deliver adverts to mobile web as well as app.

In addition to choosing an ad network, there are several other things to consider when working with mobile ad networks.

Filtering adverts

It is vital that your mobile advertising network allows you to maintain quality control on the advertising you are showing.  For example, you may decide that you don’t – or legally can’t – show gambling adverts.  All good networks will offer you fine grained control over what content gets shown on your site.

All networks will let you filter out adverts by category.  Some will let you filter by keyword or destination URL.  That means you can block your competitors’ adverts from appearing on your site.

Make sure that your network will fully explain how their filtering works – your reputation may be at stake if you allow advertising which runs counter to your editorial position.

Of course, the more adverts you filter out, the fewer adverts may be shown.  This will lead to a high NFR…

NFR

One important thing to consider when choosing a mobile advertising network is their NFR – No Fill Rate.

Every time you request an advert from your network, they will perform a complex series of calculations to determine which advert will be best suited to your content and your visitors.  On occasion, they may find that they have no suitable adverts – or their advertisers’ budgets have been depleted and they cannot afford to advertise with you.

At this point, the content owner is faced with either showing the content without advertising, or using house advertising.

House adverts

Most mobile advertising networks will let you run “house ads” at no extra cost.  A house ad is an advert for your own internal products and services.  For example, a newspaper may run a house ad encouraging readers to download their branded Sudoku app or to subscribe to the paper’s print edition.

Running house ads is a great way to show off your own content to your readers.  It is also a low-cost way to deal with NFR.

Mediating networks

Why choose just one mobile advertising network?  Rather than signing a contract with a single provider, it’s possible to use an advertising mediator.

The concept behind mediation is simple, you engage multiple networks to bid against each other for your advertising locations.  If one network has a high NFR you can use another network to ensure that the advertising location is filled.

You can choose which advertising networks you want to integrate with your mediator – and which you wish to exclude.

With most mediation networks, you will still have to sign contracts with each individual advertising network.

There are two potential downsides to using mediators.  First, they may take a percentage of your earnings as commission.  So while you may get more advertising, it may not be as profitable.

Second, you run the risk of duplication.  For example, suppose that your primary advertising network has shown the user a Coca-Cola advert.  After displaying the advert 5 times, the network may conclude that as the user hasn’t engaged with the advert, it’s unlikely to elicit a response and so it will stop showing it – thus generating a NFR. At which point, your mediator will pick another advertising network which will start showing adverts for Coca-Cola.

This is a waste of time for all concerned – and is particularly likely to annoy your users if they are bombarded with the same irrelevant advertising.

Here are some of the major mediation platforms:

• Smaato
• Mopub
• AdWhirl, which is now being integrated in AdMob.

Mobile ad formats

Mobile phone screens vary in size and shape.  That’s why it is important to choose a mobile advertising network which supports a variety of advertising formats.  As well as the “traditional” banner ad – which takes up the width of the screen and usually around 10% of the height – there are several other formats which may be suitable for your content.

Rich media

Taking advantage of HTML5 features allows mobile advertisers to break out of the banner.  When a user clicks on an advert, they are not taken to the advertiser’s site – instead, the advert expands and its contents are displayed in situ.  The user can then watch an animation, view a video, interact with the contents, etc.

These sorts of adverts are popular with users due to their fun and interactive nature, but because they require a modern web browser and a high-powered phone, they aren’t available to all users.

Interstitial

An interstitial advert comes “between” the pages of a site.  For example, clicking on a news headline may take the user to a full screen advert for Volkswagen’s latest car, the user can then click through to their desired content.

Although interstitials have reasonably high engagement rates, they also can negatively impact your brand. Some users find the disruption of an enforced delay to their instant gratification deeply annoying.  Interstitial use should be very carefully tested before deploying.

How much money can a content company make?

By some estimates, the mobile game “Angry Birds” is the most popular way for people to spend time on their phones.  An estimated 65 million minutes of gameplay per day nets the company around US$1 million per month!

It’s relatively easy to construct a formula to estimate the revenue a content producer can expect to receive via mobile advertising.

Let’s make the following assumptions:

Every page on the site has 1 advert.

There’s a 5% NFR.  This is variable depending on your advertising partner and mediation network.

CPC is 10c.  Again, this is highly variable. If your site attracts viewers likely to click on adverts for Rolex watches, this could be much higher.  If your readers are less wealthy, that CPC could be lower.

The click-through-rate (CTR) is 3%.  That is, for every hundred adverts shown, three are clicked.  That’s the industry average – although it will differ depending on sector and the quality of the adverts.

Pages X Fill Rate X CTR X CPC = Earning.

If you have 100,000 page views per month, the formula is:

100,000 X .95 X .3 X .10 = $2,850

This formula contains a lot of assumptions about demographic and advertising partners.  The best way to increase your revenue is to work closely with your advertising partners, let them know the demographics you are targetting, make sure that they understand the areas that you work in, send them whatever keyword data you can so that they can expertly target the advert to the reader.

Finally, none of this works without a sizeable audience.  Make sure your content is compelling and keeps the user visiting your site.

How much are other content providers making?

Naturally, it’s hard to find detailed, commercially confidential information.  The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism in the US recently published a detailed report into how newspapers are coping with mobile advertising.  It’s well worth reading.

Highlights include a newspaper making $200,000 per quarter from their “non-traditional” advertising – not bad for a circulation of 50-60,000.  Other news providers talk about expecting triple-digit mobile advertising growth over the coming year.

As the world shifts inexorably to mobile, we can expect a larger percentage of revenue to come from users engaging with content on their phones and tablets.

As audiences shift to mobile, if your advertising strategy doesn’t take this into account, you are missing an opportunity.

Choosing a mobile advertising network does not need to be a complex affair.  All good networks will make it easy for your web or app team to integrate advertising into your products.

If, at any time, you feel dissatisfied with the performance or quality, the level of competition in the market is such that it should be easy for you to switch to a different network.

To take advantage of this growth in internet advertising, we explore how to organise and motivate your sales team. Advertising sales is fundamentally about solving problems for your advertisers by providing them with products and an audience, at prices they are willing to pay.

In the next presentation we look at key sales concepts including:
• Calculating your potential advertising market.
• Identifying sales channels.
• Strategies for making money in print (or broadcast) and online.
• Motivating your sales force.
• Organising digital sales.

After looking at how to organise and motivate your sales teams, we look at two types of digital advertising: ad networks and classifieds. As we wrote about recently in the August Digital Briefing, ad networks can be an important source of early income as you grow traffic to your site.

Although a couple of large ad networks get the lion’s share of the attention, there are more than 300 ad networks out there, with some focused on specific platforms or technology such as mobile or video ad networks, some focused on specific geographical areas, others focused on specific themes or types of content such as the Active Youth Network and even others focused on audience behaviour online.

Ad networks help address a number of issues facing advertisers such as the large choice of publisher sites leading to an over-supply of ad space, and the difficulty of identifying high-quality content.

In the next presentation, we look at different ad network pricing models and how to choose the right ad network.

We look at classified advertising, beginning with a cautionary tale about the collapse of online classifieds as a revenue source for newspapers in the US. New online classified players such as Craigslist, Monster.com and HotJobs.com all helped to shift classified advertising from newspapers to new digital players. We look at how to develop your digital classifieds offering to prepare to defend yourself against new digital competitors.

Online classifieds include not only the “Big Three” of classified advertising – recruitment (jobs), real estates/rentals and auto – but also directories, free classifieds and calendars. Specialist classified providers that focus on dating, education or other types of products and services have also sprung up. Online classified advertising is in the early stages of development, but it still represents a potentially large market and has already attracted a number of large, international players.

We then cover several different strategies for developing your online classifieds business, including:
• Go it alone: building, selling and marketing your own classified advertising site.
• Build a network with other local media.
• Partner with a national site, which provides the technology and perhaps marketing and sales service, leaving you to focus on local marketing and sales.
• Enter into a traffic partnership, which means that you sell a traffic sponsorship deal to a national partner.

We look at examples of these strategies and how to organise your business to achieve success using one of these strategies.

Of course, digital advertising is a fast moving sector, so we also look at new developments and the future of the online classifieds.

In the final presentation, we look at how news organisations are using social media to generate revenue, either indirectly by using it to grow audiences and gain more data about their audiences, or directly by selling social media advertising.

The Seminar presented the following topics:

• “Online Advertising Market Overview”.  An overview of the dynamics of the Russian and Ukrainian online advertising market including market size and growth. The training focused on presenting the standards for online display advertising as well as an overview of standard pricing models.  A short discussion of ad serving systems was also included.
• “Sales Teams Organization and Motivation”.  A discussion of different approaches to sales organization and motivation as well as a discussion of integrated, independent, and hybrid online sales teams.
• “Advertising Networks”.  Training provided an overview of the structure of advertising networks as well as a discussion of the pros and cons of participating in advertising networks like Yandex Direct and Google AdSense.
• “Measuring Success – Google Analytics”.  An overview of the fundamentals of using Google Analytics to measure traffic growth and understand basic audience demographics and behavior.
• “Online Classifieds – Local Opportunities”.  Online classifieds often represent the largest category of traditional local media advertising and are often the first category to move online.  The training focused on the elements of the online classified market and techniques of managing the transition from print to online classifieds.

The goal of the seminar was to provide a common base of knowledge about the opportunities in online advertising both display and classifieds.  The seminar also encouraged discussion among participants about the pros and cons of different online advertising techniques and the potential impact on the traditional advertising business.

Location: Moscow, Russia

Dates: 27 – 28 September 2012

Attending:  Russian and Ukrainian Media Advertising Sales and Marketing Executives

When a site is just getting off the ground, publishers often turn to ad networks because it allows them to generate revenue without investing in a sales force. As you grow and after you make the necessary investment in an ad sales force, ad networks still can help you reach advertisers that your sales force might not reach and sell areas of your site you cannot sell. Ad networks will help you set a baseline, a floor, for ad rates in your market. This will help you know how to price the advertising you sell directly. Armed with this information, you can calculate your market’s potential for digital advertising at an early stage, letting you know how much revenue you can expect in the early days of your site and helping you to generate revenue to pay for the resources you’ll need to create content and build your audience. As your site develops, revenue from ad networks might decline as a percentage of your overall advertising revenue, but it is likely to remain an important foundation to build on.

Choosing the right network

Competition is fierce amongst ad networks with a myriad of regional and global players. One online directory lists 380 networks. Out of the hundreds of ad networks available, many publishers start with those from search engines such as Google and Yandex, the dominant search engine for the Russian language. The search engines have built their ad networks using the powerful text processing services they use for their search services to deliver contextually relevant advertising based on your content.

Google AdSense and Yandex Direct are also easy to set up, and we’ve created guides on how to get started with AdSense if you aren’t already using it as well as a guide on how to measure and maximise revenue when using AdSense. We will be writing a similar guide for Yandex Direct in the near future. However, as we said, there are hundreds of ad networks. To help decide which ad network or networks is the best for you, you’ll want to consider:

• How easy is the network going to be to implement and manage?
• How large an advertising base will the ad network deliver? Major ad networks such as AdSense run ads for hundreds of thousands of advertisers, and that helps drive up ad rates and your returns.
• Which network delivers the most relevant advertising for my audience? You will have to balance the potential volume the ad network can deliver versus the targeting it can deliver. The higher the volume of advertisers the more likely that there will be an ad for your page, and the bidding for the ad spot will drive generally higher prices than if there is no market for the spot.  But you have to balance that with the click through. No click, no cash. Many ad networks are targeted in some way, either by advertiser target, geographic target, or platform target, such as mobile versus desktop. For instance, if your site is very specific to health-related issues, then the ads from a vertical ad network targeting healthcare ads might generate more revenue since they are more specific and likely to get a higher click through.
• How much are you likely to earn from ads placed on the ad network based on your current traffic or traffic projections on a new product?
• How consistent is the ad network with your editorial identity?

Building traffic and building revenue

For Mediazavod.ru, the website of MDLF client Chelyabinski Rabochiy, Yandex seemed to be the easiest way for the site to get started with digital advertising back in May 2010, said editor Dmitry Konoplev, adding that another appeal of Yandex Direct is that it delivers 45% of the revenue per click to the publisher.

The red line is traffic, and the blue line is income per month in roubles from Yandex Direct. The left vertical axis is income from Yandex Direct, and the right vertical axis is traffic.

Revenue from Yandex Direct has risen in line with traffic. As Mediazavod’s experience shows, one positive thing about ad networks is that even as traffic rises, it does not dilute the return, and Yandex Direct now provides 16% of advertising for the site. Building traffic is key to building revenue, both in terms of driving higher revenue from ad networks but also in making your site attractive to premium advertisers.

Apart from working to grow the traffic to your site, Knopolev says that it is important to develop content that will perform well, using the contextual advertising service provided by Yandex Direct.

“Articles about real estate, technology, music and cinema are much more attractive for ads than publication about (news) and social ills,” he said. Of course, content that works well for ad networks must be balanced with news content because news attracts the greatest numbers of readers and therefore the most traffic, he added.

One criticism of ad networks is that they don’t deliver relevant ads or in the worst case place ads that could be seen as being in bad taste. Knopolev gave the example of funeral services advertising being placed alongside a story about the death of an ex-governor, or worse yet if weapons ads were placed next to a story about a shooting.

Sometimes it stirs up our readers and they write angry posts on Twitter, he said. It is not always possible to change the context settings, however, both Yandex  Direct and Google AdSense have words you can eliminate from being used in delivering advertising – words such as death, funeral, gun, disease, drugs and sex.

Moving beyond ad networks

Once you’ve built traffic to the point where your site can attract advertising agencies and your sales staff can sell premium advertising on your site, ad networks won’t be as high of a priority. As the revenue mix at Mediazavod also shows, classified advertising can be an important source of digital advertising revenue.

At independent news website Malaysiakini, another MDLF client, ad network revenue only represents 10% of overall advertising revenue, according to senior advertising manager Chia Ting Ting.

The site is focused on growing its already substantial premium advertising revenue, and ad networks cannot match the return they are getting from this type of advertising.

Chia also says that it is important to view your advertising as part of your content. Readers judge your site based on the quality of the content you produce and also the quality of your ads.

Seeing ads that are clearly from Google AdSense detract from the premium image she is trying to create for the site to attract high value advertisers, she said, and in their use of AdSense, they take care to use the ad format that less clearly marks the ad as coming from AdSense.

They also use other ad networks such as Malaysia’s Innity and Indian ad network Komli, which have ad formats that are less easily identified by readers.

With the site now well established, they also make sure that any ad network ads are given less prominent placement on the site, which frees up the most valuable ad slots for their premium advertisers.

However, even for a well established site, ad networks can still play an important role for an independent news site like Malaysiakini. In Malaysia, many of the biggest brands and advertisers are GLCs – “government linked companies”. GLCs and other major corporate brands might hesitate to advertise with an independent news site like Malaysiakini which can be critical of the authorities, but the site was able to have advertising from major brands like the state-owned oil company Petronas via an ad network.

Although Malaysiakini has graduated from relying on using ad networks to attract premium advertisers, she says they can still play a role, especially for sites just starting out. Now, Malaysiakini earns ten times more with its own sold ads above the rate paid for ad networks, and it has been able to double its advertising revenue in the past year.

Next month, we’ll look at how to move up the value chain and use more advanced advertising techniques to increase advertising performance.

Understanding advertisers, ad auctions and types of ads

First, it is important to understand how an ad gets selected for display on your website and how much the advertiser will pay.  Usually this is done through the real-time ad auction, which automatically matches advertisers who have signed up to place their ads with Google AdWords with websites looking to host advertisements through Google AdSense.  The ad auction consists of a pool of relevant ads that are bidding for your space, and based on their bid and their likely performance one ad will win.

To determine who wins the auction, Google assigns a quality score for each ad based on a few factors including the ad’s past performance. Google creates an AdRank which takes into account the quality score and the maximum CPC (cost per click) that the ad is willing to pay.  The advertiser with the highest AdRank wins that spot on your site, but what they pay is based on their quality score, and the AdRank of the other bidders.  This rate, which is not necessarily their maximum bid, is therefore heavily impacted by the amount of bidders in the auction pool.

Watch this 5-minute video for all you need to know about Ad Auctions (and remember that in YouTube you can always click the CC button to close caption into another language).

Advertisers who are part of AdWords also choose one of three types of ways that they want to target their ads:

• Contextual targeting is when the advertisement’s keywords (entered by the advertiser) are matched against words used on the webpage.
• Placement targeting (or managed placements) is when the advertiser hand-picks websites they want to advertise on.
• Interest-based advertising is when ads are shown to specific audiences based on the advertiser choosing from 1,600 interest categories, and matching them to a specific audience based on a combination of your website’s keywords and the users’ cookies (small files that contain information on other sites they tend to visit, demographic information they may have entered on other websites or social networks, etc.)

Measuring performance

To get an overview of how well your ads are performing, click on the Performance Reports tab in your AdSense interface. Here you can see your estimated earnings, page views, clicks, PCR (page-clickthrough-rate), CPC (cost-per-click), and page RPM (average amount of money made per 1,000 pageviews) for any date range you choose.

You can also compare two date ranges. This can be useful if you made a change to your ads or site layout and want to see how that might have impacted the performance of your ads.

One thing to note is that currently all the AdSense reports are based on the United States Pacific Time (PT) time zone and a day is considered to start at 12:00 am PT and end at 11:59 pm PT. There is no option as of yet to change this.

Measuring performance: Reports

Under the Performance Report tab, the left sidebar provides you with a variety of report types.

• Ad units – displays performance reports based on an ad unit (an individual or a set of ads displayed based on the results of one piece of AdSense code repeated in different spaces on your website).
• Ad sizes – displays performance reports based on the different ad sizes you have used on your site.
• Ad types – displays performance reports based on the different types of ads ultimately displayed, including images, text, rich media, flash, etc.  This is especially useful if you have allowed all ad types, and want to see if some do better than others.
• Targeting types – displays performance reports based on contextual targeting, placement targeting, and interest-based advertising.
• Bid types – displays performance reports based on ads that are paid by CPC (cost per click) or by CPM (cost per thousand impressions).

To makes sense of the reports, you’ll want to familiarise yourself with common digital advertising terms such as ad click-through-rate, matched revenue per thousand impressions (matched RPM) and revenue per thousand impressions (RPM). Google has a comprehensive glossary for the terms that are used in its AdSense reports. In addition to the glossary, Google also has this 2-minute video that provides a step-by-step explanation of how to use advanced reports.

Custom channels

A custom channel is a group of ad units defined by you for reporting purposes.  For example, you might create one custom channel for your homepage, and one for a section front and another for a layout that you are trying out at the top of a page.

When creating a custom channel, you can also check the option for “Show this custom channel to advertisers as a targetable ad placement”.  This important option allows you to optimize placement targeted ads by creating a channel which groups ad placements by topic, ad format, or location on a page – all important distinctions for advertisers looking to buy a specific location or reach a particular audience.  Once you check this option, you will be asked for more information:

• Ads appear on: Note where ads in this placement appear on your site – on the homepage, or on other types of pages.
• Ad location: Select the location on the page where ads in this placement appear. For example, you might make a placement featuring ads in the top right of your pages.
• Description: This is what an advertiser will probably use to decide whether to place the ad or not so be very specific.  Even go so far as to suggest an audience type who will likely view these ads.
• Site language: The primary language of your site content.

URL channels

These are custom channels for reporting on your ads based on the directory structure of your site. By entering a top-level domain name or main web address of your site, you can track all the pages on that domain, or you can enter a partial URL, which would allow you to track ad performance on a particular section on your site.

Google Analytics

If you are using Google Analytics for your website, you can also link your AdSense data with your Google Analytics account, which will give you even more information about who is clicking on your ads. For example, you can see the geographic region where they’re coming from, what referring site sent them to your site, and how long they stay on your page before clicking an ad.

To see your AdSense data, either click on the Content section in the Google Analytics navigation sidebar for your AdSense reports, or click the AdSense Revenue tab for a breakdown of your traffic by AdSense impressions, clicks and revenue in many other reports.

Google has a tutorial on how to link your AdSense and Analytics accounts.

Optimising your ad performance

Linking AdSense to Google Analytics is just one way to measure the performance of your ads so that you evolve your strategy to get the highest possible returns from your ads. You’ll want to interpret your data and make small, informed changes to improve your advertising strategy. There are several different ways to optimise the performance of your ad network advertising. According to Google:

• Wider ad sizes tend to perform the best because of how much easier they are to read. AdSense suggests a few sizes that work best when you create your ad unit, but it is important to keep in mind your own website’s layout.
• Customise the colours of text, links and the ad background to integrate better with your site.
• In general, ads located above the scroll tend to perform better than those that require users to scroll to see.
• Ads placed near navigational aids and other engaging content also perform well due to high visibility.

Google has a number of suggestions for the best layouts to drive ad performance.

Limiting ads through blocking

Of course, the best way to optimize the amount of money you get for ads is to allow as many advertisers as possible to enter the ad auction, simply and easily.  However, you could have ads placed on your site that are offensive or ads for your competitors that you would want to block from advertising on your page. To block or limit ads, you can click the Allow & Block Ads tab to include specific URLs, topics, sensitive categories, or even specific ad networks.

You also do have the option, on your settings page, to hold all ads for a 24-hour review period before they show up on your site.  However, the default is to run ads immediately which will maximize your potential revenue by opening up the competition to more ads.

Other Google ad services

Connect with high-quality advertisers

The Google Affiliate Network is a free service to connect accepted publishers to high-quality advertisers, currently supporting websites from 80 countries.  It allows for a more flexible pricing scheme, determined between you and the affiliate.  But it also requires more pro-activity to keep up your relationship with the affiliate advertisers. See the publisher optimisation checklist for an overview of how to stay on top of things.
Learn more about the Affiliate Network.

Keeping up-to-date information in DoubleClick Ad Planner

The DoubleClick Ad Planner is a free service that allows advertisers to quickly find websites that match their target audience.  So it is important to make sure that your website information is complete and up-to-date so the right advertisers will find you.  In your DoubleClick Ad Planner publisher profile, you can include a 250 character description of your site, the URL of a page on your site that describes how to advertise with you, up to five categories reflecting the content of your site, the different advertising types, formats and sizes that your site supports and whether you would like to share your Google Analytics data with DoubleClick Ad Planner.

The first step to create your profile is to claim your website in the Ad Planner.  See instructions for how to claim your site.

Find more information on DoubleClick Ad Planner.

Test different designs and pages

This new service allows you to do some advanced A/B testing on your website. You can create up to five different versions of a webpage and when someone visits the site, they will be shown one of these options.  Then you can report on these different webpage options against your Google Analytic goals to understand how different layouts impact your click-through rate (see future issues of the Digital Briefing for more about Google Analytics and goals).  Learn more about the Google Content Experiment, or get an overview on how to setup a content experiment.

Special service for small business

DoubleClick for Small Businesses is free service (if you serve less than 90 million monthly ad impressions, not including AdSense ads) provides you with several features to take greater advantage of your AdSense account.  If you are at a point where you have begun to receive requests from advertisers, or you manage multiple ad networks, or you just need greater control over your ad delivery, the service will help you to do all of that.  For example, you can limit the amount of times a user sees the same ad within a given period, or enable real-time competition between Google AdSense, Affiliates and third party ad-networks, or you can create mobile-specific targeting options.  See a full list of features.

Other AdSense products

• Link Units: display a short list of related topics that the user clicks on to get even more targeted ads.  This is a smaller display and can be useful in spots where an ad unit wouldn’t fit into the layout.
• AdSense for search: Create a Google search on your site and if a user clicks on one of the ads in the search result you will earn revenue.  The search can be just for your site, for a collection of sites, or for the whole web.  You can also prioritise or restrict the search to a section of your webpage.
• AdSense for mobile content: Google ads on your mobile webpages
• AdSense for feeds: Google ads in your feeds
• AdSense for video: InVideo overlay and text overlay ads for your video content
• AdSense for games: advertising specifically for games played within the browser
• AdSense for domains: links, search results, advertisements and other content for your unused domains
• AdMob: Google ads for your mobile applications

To get a more in-depth view of AdSense, you can go through the thorough online lessons at the AdSense Academy.

Warning: How not to increase revenue

AdSense has fairly strict policies against certain practices that would encourage fake click-throughs.  A big one is masking ads – you cannot make it difficult to distinguish ads from your content.  You also cannot use any language to encourage people to click on the ads, or place misleading labels above ad units such as “Favourite Sites” or “Today’s Top Offers”.  Google advises to avoid partnering with untrusted or low-quality ad networks, search engines or directory sites in an effort to increase traffic. Lastly, there is a strict rule against clicking on your own ads – even if you’re interested in an ad or looking for its destination URL. Instead of clicking on the ad on your site, Google advises you to use a search engine to find the URL for that company.

Already, Africa boasts an estimated 649m subscribers in Africa and an estimated 86m new subscribers will be added by the end of the year, according to the mobile operator industry group GSMA. The number of mobile subscribers has grown by 20 percent each year over the past five years.

On the Knowledge Bridge, we have talked about the surge of mobile communications in Africa and given emphasis to the impact it ought to have on news groups trying to reach their audiences. Research from InMobi, the largest independent mobile advertising network, has found that this rapid growth in mobile use is also leading to rapid growth of mobile media consumption and mobile advertising across much of the continent.

According to the report, South Africa has experienced an increase of 14% in mobile advertising impressions on InMobi’s mobile network over the first three months of 2012, whereas the market grew 12% in Kenya. However, that pales in comparison to growth in Nigeria which saw a growth rate of 37%, the fastest in Africa, netting advertisers more than 8bn advertising impressions. Nigeria also had the distinction of being Africa’s largest mobile advertising market. With such growth, mobile technology is becoming a mainstream marketing and advertising medium through which to reach African consumers.

Mobile websites a must

A new report from Juniper Research finds that in-app advertising spend across all mobile devices will reach $7 bn by 2015, up from $2.4bn in 2012. Juniper says that some brands have moved quickly to reach consumers via their mobile devices while others have yet to even create mobile websites.

In making the digital transition, it is key that news organisations not miss out on the shift to mobile, especially in markets like Africa where many consumers are skipping the desktop internet and going straight to mobile. Just as Juniper recommends that brands need, at the very least, to have mobile websites, news organisations need to make sure that their sites are prepared to serve the growing percentage of their audience who only use their mobile phones to access the internet.

Earlier this year, browser developer Opera, maker of the popular Opera Mini mobile browser, found that of its 169m users worldwide 56 percent only access the internet via their mobile phones. That figure was even higher in some African countries, with 68% of users in Senegal and 61% of users in South Africa exclusively using mobile phones to get online. Without a mobile website, you could be failing to reach the majority of your audience. If you only have a site intended for desktop computers, not only will it load slowly – if at all – for mobile web users, it could also cost them money as the larger page file sizes eat into their data allowance.

Revenue opportunities from the mobile web

Without a mobile website, you’re not just cutting off a large part of your audience, you’re also missing out on advertising opportunities.

In South Africa, the mobile advertising market is expected to grow to 1 billion rand, $118.7m, this year, doubling in just one year. Jason Probert, Head of Vodacom Mobile Media, told South African tech site Memeburn:

Previous estimates have dramatically underestimated the size of the mobile advertising industry as they focused on reports submitted to the DMMA by online publishers. When you take into account the entire mobile advertising ecosystem and include mobile ad networks like AdMob, operator services like Apple, mobile search and social networks like MXit, the picture is dramatically different.

South Africa is a relatively advanced mobile market, but the growth in mobile advertising will follow the audience, especially as advertisers find ways to successfully reach that audience. In Ghana, Volkswagen ran a text-based mobile advertising campaign to promote its new SUV. Mobile marketing agency Optism said the campaign had a 30% response rate and that 90% of respondents asked for more information. Optism quoted a Volkswagen representative as saying:

In our business, timing is critical. With Optism and Tigo Ads, we know we’re reaching people who are interested in our ads, and we can be confident they are reading our messages because mobile messaging is so reliable.

Optism says that while text-based advertising can be effective, getting permission from consumers is critical to success.

Mobile advertising is developing rapidly and one of the lessons of the digital transition is that news businesses need to make sure that they are not left behind, either in reaching mobile audiences or generating revenue to support journalism from mobile advertising.

When Microsoft bought aQuantive, online display advertising was booming and the software maker was hoping to challenge the display king at the time, Yahoo, and the rapidly rising online advertising giant Google. It’s important to remember that while Google made its name as the search engine of choice for billions of internet users, the business that drives its billions of dollars in profit is advertising – search, display and mobile. How times have changed!

In a few short years, Facebook has knocked Yahoo from its display ad throne, and the bigger challenge for the entire sector is that the returns for display advertising have been plummeting.

In looking at Microsoft’s multibillion dollar write down, Reuters looked at why the display advertising market has gone soft:

The main culprit is an explosion of advertising space offered by Facebook Inc and other websites that is outpacing steady demand. But automated online exchanges, smarter search advertising and a growing skepticism about the effectiveness of jamming ads in people’s faces have also conspired to slash prices and suck profits out of the business.

“The inventory or amount of ad spots grew so fast, it outgrew demand,” said Dave Morgan, an industry veteran and entrepreneur. “That brought pricing down massively. So a lot of display advertising really became a ghetto for bad direct-response advertising.”

It’s not just the simple law of supply (or in this case, over-supply) and demand. Studies find that sophisticated users are able to simply blank out advertising, no matter how intrusive; Reuters quoted one business saying that it had shifted from using display ads to paid search advertising, affiliate marketing and comparison shopping sites.

For news organisations, Microsoft’s failure and the decline of the display advertising market hold some important lessons:

• Target your ads to improve performance. Reuters said that while Microsoft’s acquisition failed, Google’s purchase of display ad company DoubleClick worked in part because the search giant used its technology to deliver more relevant ads through better targeting.
• Keep pace with innovative ad offerings. You don’t want to be in the position of the US newspaper industry which now captures less than a percentage of digital advertising than they did a decade ago. Many advertising innovations have come from outside of the news and media industry. It’s important to make sure make sure that your advertisers aren’t lured away by these new digital competitors.
• Consider affiliate sales and marketing. Digital can connect an interested buyer with a seller in ways that weren’t possible in other media. Buyers can easily click from ad to purchase, and if you drove them to buy, then you’ll want to capture your commission.

Digital media doesn’t simply change your editorial opportunities, it also changes your advertising opportunities – and challenges. To make the transition to a sustainable digital news organisation, you’ll want to innovate in your advertising and sales just as your newsroom makes the effort to innovate editorially.

In India, the mobile handset market witnessed 6 percent growth in the first quarter of 2012, while the smartphone market surged by 17 percent, says market research firm Gartner. Nielsen also found that as Indian mobile users switch to smartphones, they spend more time consuming content than making calls or sending text messages, which brings new opportunities for content creators, including news organisations, as well as advertisers.

New patterns of smartphone use also present challenges and opportunities for news publishers and advertisers. For advertisers, new ad technology such as real-time bidding gives them more control and an ability to target their audience. It also gives publishers more opportunities for monetization by letting them sell ad space through competitive auctions.

However, Vishal Bali, Regional Managing Director of Nielsen’s telecom industry group, noted that we are seeing significant resistance among smartphone users towards mobile advertising. As smartphone usage and the app space begin to mature, publishers need to look for new ways to monetize beyond the single ad network system. In particular they need to think about how to maintain the availability of various ad formats on different screen sizes.

Not everyone is so bullish, not least because digital advertising isn’t proving as lucrative for content companies, as search and social advertising continues to capture most of the revenue and also as ad networks push down digital advertising returns. These trends have meant that the direct link between rising traffic and rising advertising returns has broken for many websites.

Former Apple executive Jean-Louis Gassée warns that we might be falling into what he called “an age-old and dangerously misleading algorithm”:

The [new thing] is like the [old thing] only [smaller | bigger]

With respect to mobile advertising, he sees this formula playing out this way:

Now we have advertising on smartphones, and we’ve fallen into a comfortable, predictable rut: “It’s just like Web advertising on the PC, shrunk to fit.” We see the same methods, the same designs, the same business models, wedged onto a smaller screen.

Gassée points to another observation by Meeker that attention is very fragmented on smartphones. Although people are spending an increasing amount of time with their smartphones, not all of this time is spent on activities that might be advertising-supported. More than 40% of time spent with our smartphones is still about communicating, whether that is sending messages or email or simply using the smartphone as a phone.

As Gassée says:

We’re not paying (a loaded word) the same type of attention as we do on a PC.

Just as advertising shouldn’t be your sole source or revenue for digital content on the web, it shouldn’t be your only revenue strategy on mobile. Already revenue from app sales is outpacing revenue from mobile advertising, and developing premium apps might be just one way to make mobile pay.

Reuters reported that overall in the US, digital advertising revenue for newspapers grew only 1% in the first quarter of 2012, making it their fifth consecutive quarter of declining digital advertising revenue, according to the Newspaper Association of America. At the New York Times, digital advertising dropped by 2.3%, but it was much worse at the Washington Post, which saw digital advertising plummet by 7% at its flagship newspaper site and also Slate.com.

A flood of excess advertising space, the rise of electronic advertising exchanges that sell ads at cut-rate prices, and the weak U.S. economy are all contributing to the slowdown, publishing executives and observers say.

However, this is not just about US newspapers getting lower rates due to a glut of advertising inventory or the downward pressure on rates due to advertising exchanges. US newspapers actually capture a smaller slice of the digital advertising pie now than they did in 2003. While digital advertising revenue has galloped ahead rising from $7.3bn to $31.7bn in 2011, US newspapers share of digital advertising has hit an all-time low. In 2003, newspapers managed to capture 16.7% of all digital advertising in the US – not a great number, but respectable. However, by 2011, US newspapers managed to grab only 10.3% of digital advertising

Why are newspapers capturing less of the digital ad spending? Reuters says that while newspapers used to be one of the best ways to deliver an audience to advertisers, the industry doesn’t have the same advantage in the digital content market that it had in print. From Reuters’ analysis:

Advertisers “are buying audience instead of context and they don’t care what sites they are on,” said Gordon McLeod, president of Krux, a company that helps websites interpret data.

The lessons for news organisations making the digital transition in any country is two-fold. The first, that we’ve mentioned previously on the Knowledge Bridge, is that advertising shouldn’t be the only source of revenue for your digital business. Most companies that have succeeded in digital have done so by building a range of digital sources for revenue including dating services, digital marketing services, events and even niche digital services such as holiday-home booking businesses.

Secondly, as Rick Edmonds at Poynter pointed out, news organisations have been urged to stop selling their advertising inventory through ad exchanges. Instead, news organisations should develop ways to develop more targeted ads and develop other “premium-priced ad placements”. Fundamentally, the lesson is that advertising innovation is as important for your long-term sustainability as editorial innovation.