Yeah! Let's just stop selling our placements at low prices! How about if we just hire Henry Paulson and nationalize online display ad sales and then get Barney Frank and Chris Dodd to regulate them so that we can remove the riff-raff sellers from the process!
Or, its possible that online display ads are following the natural course of economics - namely that the price of a good (in a relatively free market) tends towards its incremental cost of delivery. For a "premium" publisher (read lots of fixed monthly investments in infrastructure like content, web service, sales, billing/receiving, management, etc), that incremental cost tends to be higher - so the price has to be higher. But, in the ocean of supply from the long tail (alexa rank less than 2,000 say) - the incremental price keeps going down until you get, mostly, to just the cost of electronic delivery of bits to your browser. And I guess that's around $0.23 or so.
I think the music business is also struggling with this concept too.
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