Educating advertisers

It is one of the paradoxes of digital journalism that increasing the size of your audience doesn’t always result in higher income. Some of that disparity can be attributed to the fact that while advertisers want to shift their advertising budgets from offline media to online media, they also need to learn about the opportunities, Chia said. Educating advertisers about the possibilities of digital advertising is an important first step in building an effective and revenue-earning premium advertising strategy.

Educating advertisers starts with producing rate cards and media kits to fully introduce their site to advertisers. One of the key messages is that digital advertising is not a blind mass campaign, she says. Online advertising is about about measurability and being able to target specific audiences. She said:

You need to have a demographic breakdown (of the visitors to your site). That is the main product you can use to attract advertisers and convince advertisers to come and buy advertisement on your website.

To deliver better targeted and better performing digital advertising campaigns, publishers need to invest in technology that allows them to build a demographic profile of their audience. Malaysiakini has detailed information about the age, income and education of their audiences. They have information about the interests of their audience, such as whether they are into automobiles or online banking. All of this data, which is included in their media kits, provide essential demographic information to advertisers so they know who they can reach by partnering with the site.

In addition to printed media kits, Malaysiakini also has an advertising blog which provides further information about advertising packages and advertiser-focused events. These events and conferences are another way to educate advertisers and communicate to them the opportunities they have with digital advertising.

“We actually have a new media school. We discuss different topics, and we invite advertisers, agencies and advertising department staff,” she said. They sometimes charge for these conferences, particularly when they have high profile speakers who bring expertise in digital advertising campaign measurement, models and services. Some conferences are on very specific topics such as how to use measurement tools like Google Analytics.

Premium advertising strategies

One of the factors contributing to the challenge that news organisations have faced in earning advertising revenue from their digital audiences has been downward pressure on digital advertising rates. Many early stage news websites are reliant on advertising networks for their ad strategies, but falling rates over the past several years have made it difficult for news sites to earn enough revenue from digital advertising alone to cover their costs. Malaysiakini earns less than 10 percent of its advertising revenue from ad networks. Instead of relying on ad networks, they have developed premium advertising strategies based not just on the richness of the demographic data but also on providing new ad formats that appeal to advertisers.

Malaysiakini charges premium rates for premium placement on their site. “It is usually the top spot, and it has very high engagement and is very creative,” Chia says. Malaysiakini does not put ad network slots on the top of their pages because it would undermine their efforts to charge higher rates for those slots.

Premium buy advertising is sold by their own in-house sales team, and the premium pricing is for advanced campaigns. Companies allocate a lot of money to premium campaigns, she said. This is where the demographic data of their audience is key in convincing advertisers to pay more, not just for premium placement but also to reach specific audiences.

Chia says that you also need to have flexible site designs to make sure that audiences don’t suffer from “ad blindness”. Ad blindness occurs when publishers have fixed spots and formats for their advertising. After a while, audiences simply learn to ignore these areas of the site.

Be nimble

News publishers need more than just flexible designs. They also need to be nimble to keep pace with the rapid changes in digital advertising. Real-time bidding is coming to markets like Malaysia. As we’ve written about before, real-time bidding, also known as programmatic or algorithmic buying, uses site visitor data to buy, sell and display highly targeted advertising. Publishers are concerned that real-time bidding, or RTB, will put further downward pressure on advertising rates.

“RTB is one type of ad network,” Chia said, adding, “your ad will only appear to your target audience. … (RTB) is not a blind network but a highly targeted network.”

She gave the example of two computer companies, Acer and Toshiba, trying to sell their laptops. They will enter their bid price, and Malaysiakini will enter their floor price, the minimum price they will sell their advertising for. If the companies bid over the floor price, and if the target demographic visits the site, their ad will appear.

There are concerns that RTB will affect their premium ad strategy, but in this industry, when everyone launches a new technology, “we cannot escape from the new landscape,” she said. “We need to be part of it.”

With high growth and intense competition, news organisations need to stay on top of the latest developments to be competitive in the data-driven marketing era. Digital media poses business challenges, but it also requires news groups to understand key pieces of technology and terminology.

While the basic proposition of matching advertisers with audiences remains unchanged, in the digital world serving up highly targeted advertising has developed into the incredibly fast interchange of data and ad inventory between interconnected elements of advertising services platforms.  In plain English, as Ben Kneen at Ad Ops Insider says, incredibly powerful computers are running at companies such as Google’s DoubleClick and its rival Atlas that allow the buying and selling of highly targeted ads in milliseconds.

To get a strategic view of these ad technologies, we take a look at the challenges and opportunities for news organisations brought about by real-time bidding (or programmatic buying, as it is also known) in a discussion with digital advertising expert, Rodney Mayers, Chief Revenue Officer of data publishing company Proximic.

Initially one of the biggest challenges is understanding the terminology and the bewildering array of acronyms. This guide will help you make sense of it all.

Ad Exchanges – Just like a stock exchange, ad exchanges serve as an open online advertising market for buyers (publishers) and sellers (advertisers) to connect. Search advertising has captured a lot of the growth in digital advertising in the past decade fueling the development of search engines. While ruling the search engine market in many countries, Google acquired ad exchange DoubleClick, which rapidly became the biggest player amongst real-time ad networks. Google’s ad exchange helps advertisers to run display ad campaigns across the Google Content Network and on YouTube. By leveraging this platform, advertisers and publishers find it easier to manage and monitor ad campaigns in a multitude of formats and across thousands of websites.

Recently, major media companies such as Hearst and Condé Nast  and broadcaster NBC, all in the US, have launched their own private ad exchanges, enticing buyers with ever-more detailed data that advertisers can use to more accurately target the publishers’ audiences.

Data Management Platforms (DMPs) – Companies use DMPs to collect and analyse huge amounts of data from many different sources. DMPs are now so powerful that companies can track users and customers who visit from banners, Facebook pages, Tweets, mobile, video and even offline applications. They collect and analyse data from cookies, small files that keep website settings and also record user behaviour. For example, DMPs can allow e-commerce sites, publishers and advertisers to find out how many users who bought a big screen TV online also searched for high-end digital cameras in the past week.

DMPs consolidate user data into a centralised platform. They can be used not only for buying ad impressions, but also to help publishers achieve the long-term goal of attracting predefined targetable audiences. DMPs can help publishers gain more precise information about their audiences, which is useful not only in helping to sell more targeted, more effective advertising, but also in providing greater insight into the needs and interests of their readers or viewers.

DMPs can provide extremely useful insights, however publishers shouldn’t be misled into thinking that they are the sole source of useful audience data. “While DMPs do an admirable job creating segments based on data collected across multiple sites, publishers have their own treasure trove of data that often is under-leveraged for ad sales purposes,” says John Strabley, a media analyst writing for Business 2 Community.

Real-Time Bidding (RTB) – Based on campaign goals and audience profiles, real-time bidding allows ad buyers to bid for each and every impression. This dynamic transformation is called a “bidder” which can be built into any of the above platforms. For publishers, they can keep track of all their bids and build a picture of demand down to the advertiser level. However, one thing publishers should keep in mind is that data leakage is a potential risk in RTB platforms. Other parties using DSPs (Demand Side Platforms – see below) can read the stream of pages that come through in bid requests and use that to gain intelligence on their competitors.

Real-time bidding platforms still tend to be small relative to the total online advertising market, representing just $1.1 bn out of the total online advertising market, according to technology analysis firm IDC.

Supply-Side Platforms (SSPs) – SSPs provide publishers with an effective way to measure the monetization of mobile and website attention. Attention data includes a range of statistics such as how much time visitors spend on a site, the number of pages or pieces of content a visitor views per session and the percentage of return visitors to your site. SSPs allow publishers to jump into the ad exchange to make their inventory available and optimize selling of their online media space. More practically, they help publishers sell their inventory at a higher price because publishers can demonstrate more clearly how their content performs to advertisers.

Demand-Side Platforms (DSPs) – DSPs work together with ad exchanges and SSPs. These three elements support real-time bidding because they give buyers and sellers the ability to “value inventory on an impression-by-impression in real-time,” says Ben Kneen on his site, Adopsinsider.com. According to Kneen, the interplay of these systems enables targeted ads to be bid on and served to a browser in about 50 milliseconds.

DSPs submit a bid to the SSP along with an ad based on their valuation of a specific impression, determined from data about the user. The SSP picks the winning bid and serves up the ad. It is this complicated interplay of user data and bidding servers, the DSPs, SSPs and ad exchanges, that enables the near-instantaneous delivery of targeted advertising to users.

For news organisations, the key thing to remember is that the increasingly sophisticated use of user data is allowing the ever-increasing targeting of advertising. We’ll be looking at how to develop your advertising strategy in upcoming editions of the Digital Briefing.

Resources online:

• How Real Time Bidding, DSPs, SSPs, and Ad Exchanges Work by Ben Kneen at Ad Ops Insider
• Diagramming the SSP, DSP and RTB redirect path by Ben Kneen at Ad Ops Insider
• What is the difference between DSPs and SSPs? on Quora
• Demand Side Platform and why you should care by Marc Pocelli

When they launched the portal more than a decade ago, there were very few websites in Serbia, but Krajnovic said it was primitive. Now, he said that 90 percent of local media in Serbia see their survival online.

That might explain why in the past four years, “we have invested serious funds in our website,” he said. The investment paid off in traffic, allowing them to overtake the daily newspaper in Novi Sad, and the portal now has 20,000 daily visits and 200,000 monthly unique users, he added. With 92 percent of their traffic from the region, there was the assumption that this would be an easy sell to advertisers and that the rise in traffic would translate into rising revenue.

“We thought that money would be raining down, but today we are unable to make any money online,” Krajnovic said. It has left him very disillusioned. “Local media should ask themselves whether going online, whether investing in that, is the way to go.”

His comments reflected the challenges that local outlets are facing in making money online and in traditional media in Serbia. Some issues are unique to the Serbian market, such as an extremely crowded broadcast market, with more than 400 broadcasters for a country of 7.2 m inhabitants. Some attendees of the USAID/IREX conference speculated that the government allowed so many broadcasters to keep them weak financially and editorially, unable to afford to do hard-hitting journalism and allowing them to be easily intimidated. Whether true or not, some of the issues facing local media in Serbia as they try to expand digitally will be familiar to local news businesses in other markets.

Growing but small digital ad market

The last 10 years have brought a lot of changes to the Serbian advertising market. Since 2002, it grew rapidly, increasing fourfold. But it peaked in 2008 and has not returned to the levels seen before the global financial crisis, especially now with the economic headwinds of the Eurozone crisis blowing across southern Europe.

During the last decade there have been other structural changes to the Serbian advertising market, Jovan Stojanović, Director, Direct Media, told the conference. Now, some 30 percent of advertisers in Serbia are foreign clients.

As for the rise of digital media and advertising, developments are progressing in Serbia in ways similar to many other markets. Internet use is growing rapidly. According to UK research group GfK, 55 percent of Serbians now have internet access, up 35 percent from the year before, Marko Jevtić, Business Development Director of the Httpool advertising agency said.

Although internet use is growing rapidly, internet advertising remains a relatively small part of the total advertising spend in Serbia. With 2.7 m internet users, Ivan Dimitrijević, with the Fastbridge advertising agency, said that this is just enough to attract national advertisers to internet advertising. Of the €172 m mass media ad budget in Serbia, €95 m was spent on TV, €40 m was spent on print, €20 m was spent in out of home advertising, with 5 percent being spent on radio and and another 5 percent spent on internet advertising, Darko Broćić, Managing Director, Nielsen Audience Measurement, told the conference.

Research firm Gemius estimates that €6.4 m was spent on banner advertising in Serbia in 2011. It was the lowest amongst five other countries in the region. Display advertising was more than three times that, at €21 m in Croatia, and it was four times or more in Bulgaria and Slovenia, at €24 m and €26 m respectively.

However, most advertising buys by agencies are in national media, not local or regional outlets. The only time advertisers buy, or agencies recommend them to buy, local media is when a bank is opening a local branch or a developer opens a mall, both Jevtić and Dimitrijević said. This is true in print, broadcast and digital. Meanwhile, much of that growing online advertising spend is going to large national media players, such as B92, and also to international internet giants including Google, Facebook and Amazon.

Digital advertising education

With only 5 percent of advertising spending going to the internet in Serbia, it is clear that the market is still developing. Banner ad rates are increasing at 30 percent a year, but that is from a very low base. Jevtić said that even national media are struggling to make money online. “I can count on two fingers media that are profitable online,” he said.

Low advertising spending online is partly due to a lack of understanding about internet advertising both in terms of advertisers and also media outlets. Dimitrijević said that his agency and others have to do a lot of client education around internet advertising, and he added:

TV has been around for years, so has radio. Facebook has only been around 5. People aren’t used to this. They don’t know what they can measure, what they can achieve.

One key difference between internet advertising and other forms of advertising is measurement, Dimitrijević said, adding,

We can measure everything online. We can measure how many views, how many clicks. We can measure how many purchases were made from a campaign.

It was clear at the conference that advertising agency representatives also were trying to educate local media owners about advertising in general and digital advertising specifically.

Agency representatives repeatedly stressed that their first responsibility was to their clients, to advertisers trying to reach customers for their products or services. “It is not our responsibility to make local websites profitable,” Jevtić said bluntly, adding: “It is our job to get the best for our client. There is lots of (online advertising) inventory.” He repeated how national advertising was best for their clients in all but a few cases.

To improve their advertising revenue, Dimitrijević urged local and regional media to focus their efforts on direct advertising sales.

Krajnovic responded that his website attracted just as many visitors in his region as national player B92, and that he produced high quality content.

But Jevtić said that advertisers focused on numbers and on CPM, the cost per thousand, rather than the quality of content.

To help local media, Dejan Miladinović, the president of Local Press, a local media organisation in Serbia, said that they were seeking funding, possible donor assistance, to create a portal that aggregated news from local media websites. The portal would be similar to the Serbian news agency, Beta. Local Press is also looking at paid content, either micro payments or a system similar to the national paywall in Slovakia operated by Piano Media.

It’s clear that Serbian local media face many challenges as they develop digitally, but the digital media market is at an early stage. In this early phase of digital development, it was said at the conference that local media owners need to make sure to keep costs low so that the investment doesn’t outstrip the current market potential.

The discussion holds a lot of lessons, not just for Serbian local media, but for local media everywhere. Local news organisations need to develop their understanding of digital advertising. If they do, they can help educate local advertisers about digital advertising, and news organisations that establish themselves as leaders in digital advertising and digital marketing find that they not only are able to attract more advertisers but are also able to provide digital marketing services, giving them a new revenue stream.

As was said by ad agencies at the conference in Belgrade, local news organisations probably will not be able to compete with national players for national or international clients, but they should add to their direct sales efforts. Many markets, even digitally advanced markets, are finding a lot of local advertising opportunities, but it takes education and direct stales efforts to develop them. There is money to be made in the local market through digital advertising, but it will take some time and effort by local news outlets to develop that market.

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

They have aggressively developed their premium advertising sales, which deliver 10 times the revenue of advertising from ad networks.

The site boasts 2 m unique readers in four different languages, English, Bahasa Malaysia, Chinese and Tamil, and Malaysiakini tells prospective advertisers that the site has more than 40 m page views each month.

But traffic alone isn’t the key to success. The site has hired measurement companies so that they know the demographics of their users, which is key for their three-to-four person sales team to attract premium advertisers. You don’t need to have as large of audience as Malaysiakini to be successful, but you do need to follow their lead in knowing the demographic details of your audience. As Chia Ting Ting, Malaysiakini’s senior advertising manager, says, that is what you sell to advertisers.

Chia also says that creative advertising development is essential in helping to counteract “banner blindness”, the tendency of online audiences to filter out commonly used advertising areas. Sites must also be prepared to develop “super-premium” advertising if they want to attract top-rate advertisers that can deliver significantly higher than the normal revenue of fixed ad spots.

The advertising mix on Malaysiakini

Malaysiakini has two types of advertising: premium buy and ad networks.

For premium buy advertising, the website charges a daily fixed rate, which guarantees the site a set amount of revenue regardless of performance. They charge roughly $6,500 for the leaderboard position on their homepage for one week.

In contrast, ad network rates are performance based, depending on CPC or CPM, cost-per-click or cost-per-thousand impressions.

Last month we examined how advertising networks can provide a revenue base for a new site, but as we noted, as your site grows, ad networks will play a smaller role in your revenue mix. Ad networks now only represent less than 10 percent of Malaysiakini’s revenue, and Chia makes sure that the site does not give premium placement to ad network advertising because premium ads deliver 10 times the revenue of ad network sales.

The focus on premium advertising is integral to developing the perception that Malaysiakini is a high quality site. Advertisers also know that if they see a lot of ad network inventory that the site isn’t able to sell that advertising space, and “that will affect the brand in the market,” she said. It is important to view advertising as part of the content on your site because, as Chia says, quality advertising will reinforce the perception that you provide quality content.

This isn’t to say that Malaysiakini spurns all ad networks, but Chia makes sure that they use ad networks whose content isn’t easily identifiable. They also use ad networks that can deliver advertising from high quality advertisers, such as the government-linked companies in Malaysia like Petronas that might not otherwise advertise on an independent news site like Malaysiakini.

Growing premium advertising

To get into a position to pursue premium advertising, traffic is a major factor. Once your site reaches a certain level, you will be able to engage ad agencies to help you sell your inventory. But in addition to raw numbers, you’ll want to use web analytics and audience measurement companies to understand the demographics of your audience. “A demographic is the main product for you to sell in the advertising industry,” she said.

Your content will determine the type of readers your site attracts, and specific types of content can help attract unique audiences that advertisers want to reach. “How unique is your readership? The readers are a community you build up for your site,” she said. She gave the example of a site for mothers. Such a specialist site, or it could be a special section on your site, may attract relatively low traffic, but it attracts a unique audience that certain advertisers will want to reach.

Using the example of the motherhood site, she said that it is not enough just to target mothers with your content, but you will also need to know their age and their household income. To get this level of detailed information, you will have to hire a measurement company, such as comScore or Effective Measure, she said.

Using Malaysiakini as an example, their content is focused on politics and issues related to Malaysia. “We know that politics interest business people and highly intelligent people,” Chia said. In promoting itself to advertisers, Malaysiakini emphasises that 65 percent of its readers are managers or professionals who have relatively high incomes, an attractive demographic for advertisers.

Beating banner blindness

Chia also stresses the importance of creativity in advertising, especially in terms of providing dynamic advertising design and also in providing unique advertising experiences that will attract super-premium advertisers.

One challenge for digital advertising is that readers soon ignore ads, leading to what some call banner blindness. Web usability expert Jakob Nielsen has used eye-tracking software to show how many web users completely ignore areas where advertising is commonly displayed.

In 2009, AdAge celebrated the 15-year anniversary of the first banner ad on the worldwide web. In May 1994, the age of internet advertising was born with the first banners on Hotwired.com, part of Wired magazine’s family of websites. In 1994, there were only 2 m internet users in the US, and the first advertisers included MCI, Volvo and Club Med. The reaction, especially by today’s standards was stunning, with a 78 percent click-through rate (CTR). Now the average CTR is about 0.1 percent, and on Facebook, it’s even less, dropping to half the web average, according to webtrends.

To drive continued revenue growth and beat banner blindness, Malaysiakini have created very premium ad spots they call online billboards that are not fixed and do not run everyday. To help prevent advertising blind spots, Chia also advises the tech team to change the ad location every six months.

To compete in the digital advertising market, you can’t stand still, and you need to be thinking creatively about what new products you can bring to market. “You always need to be creating new products for the advertising industry. At Malaysiakini, we think what kind of ad format or ad slot can we create that are very premium,” she said. They hope to be able to charge a daily rate of half what they now charge for their leaderboard spot for seven days.

Bringing new advertising products to market produces more inventory and can help create on-demand, premium products to attract the highest paying advertisers. Advertisers are now pushing sites to go beyond fixed positions and asking for custom advertising products. You’ll need to be in a position to take advantage of that opportunity if it arises. Chia believes that these custom, super-premium ad products will allow them to charge 100 or even 200 times the fee of traditional fixed position advertising.

Malaysiakini’s success shows that it is possible to rapidly grow digital advertising revenue to support your editorial ambitions. To effectively compete against not just other news organisations but other digital advertising options, you’ll want to follow Malaysiakini’s lead in developing your premium advertising offering. Build your audience, and use web analytics and audience measurement companies to understand the demographics of your audience. Then work on new advertising products to satisfy your premium advertising customers and prevent banner blindess.

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.

With the time visitors spend on each page decreasing in many countries – down to 40 seconds per page according to comScore – advertisers want to be sure their ads are getting maximum attention. For news publishers, the temptation is to place more and more ads on the page because the yields are so low, yet for advertisers the returns fall dramatically.

You can test your own site with a free clutter test – just add a webpage address, click the test button and the algorithms calculate how cluttered your page is. With results ranging from 16% (Google) to 86% (Yahoo), the test creators say you should aim for a score of below 50. Anything more than that and readers are likely to miss important links and may spend less time on the page.

Clearer, easier to read websites are definitely in demand by audiences. Services like Flipboard, the iPhone app that takes pages with any amount of clutter and delivers it in a clean magazine lay-out, have built their business on the appeal of uncluttered design.

The research also showed that website users spend twice as long on pages featuring ads from a single advertiser and that cleaner design delivers higher ad recall.

Key findings:

• Clean pages enhance ad and site perception: Uncluttered sites are seen as more useful and more trusted; ads on these sites are more engaging.
• Ads are always seen in a clean setting: Eye-tracking technology showed that 100% of respondents viewed ads on clean pages, compared to only 76% on cluttered, multi-advertiser pages.
• Dwell time increases on clean sites: Those who saw ads in a clean environment spent 6.4 seconds viewing it, compared to 3.2 seconds on cluttered pages.
• Less clutter means higher recall: The cleaner the design, the higher the ad recall.

Think about this research when you’re designing your website. And when you speak with advertisers you can use this research and a clean design as a selling point and as a way to differentiate yourself in the market.

One such innovation comes from DoubleRecall, which Jeff John Roberts of media site paidContent describes as a “paywall buster”. Instead of asking people to pay for the content, DoubleRecall works to get people to pay more attention to the advertising. An advertisement pops up and asks readers to type in a word or words that are included in the ad to be able to access the content. It isn’t a paid content versus pure advertising model but can be used in a hybrid model. For instance, publishers can have a paywall, and audiences can gain access for the day by engaging with one of the ads – in other words entering the text.

DoubleRecall says that audiences have much higher response rates with its advertising than with traditional display delivering 11 times the brand awareness and 30 times the click through rate of traditional banner ads. The company also claims that publishers are seeing a 300% increase in average reader revenue. In other words, the company is claiming that its customers are getting 10 times the rate of traditional banner advertising.

The service works both on mobile and traditional websites, and it’s seeing a lot of take up in Europe, where 20 publishers and 200 brands are using the service.

In an interview with Ryan Kim of GigaOm, Julien Coustaury, co-founder of DoubleRecall, said:

It’s like killing three birds with one stone. Advertisers are happy with more bang for their buck; publishers are happy with monetizing without a paywall; and readers can get premium content without paying hard cash for it.

With the rise of digital content, we will see an increase in innovation not only in content but also in advertising to support that content. This is just one option, and we’ll be on the lookout for other ideas to increase the returns from digital ads.

But digging into the report a little deeper, the bullish predictions on growth are focused on internet giants Yandex and Mail.ru. The real question is whether news organisations are ready to take advantage of the growth in the online advertising market.

In Western Europe and the US, online advertising has been growing fast, but the main beneficiaries was first Google and then social networking sites such as Facebook. In 2011, Yandex saw advertising income grow by 60%. Mail.ru sold 56% more display ads in 2011 than the year before. Display advertising is catching up with paid search advertising as the dominant form of online advertising, but this is due to growth in social media advertising, unfortunately, not because news organisations are growing their online ad share. Mail.ru attributed its growth last year to how it integrated its social networking features across its network.

Russian internet companies are experimenting with a number of advertising formats beyond simple display ads including video advertising and retargeting or behavioural targeting, showing users ads based on their activity online.  What advertising innovations will you be using to take advantage of online growth?