When I can’t sleep, I play with data. It’s like meditating. The National Venture Capital Association recently released their latest venture investment numbers for the US. On their web site, they use the annoying iChart gadget. Annoying because as you scroll backwards and forwards in time, it adjusts the x axis, so I can’t really […]
Data consistency sidebar
I mentioned here that I would compare my post on online spending trends to Rob Leathern’s and see why we came to different conclusions. The answer, unsurprisingly to anyone who’s done any work with this type of industry data, is that we use different numbers. I used TNS for ad spend data. Rob used both […]
How to rake it in by screwing your customers
A long, long time ago I was at Prodigy when we decided to change from hourly pricing to a flat rate of $19.95 per month. Flat rate pricing was clearly preferred by our customers, and our competitors who were offering it were taking them away from us. Problem was, when people are accessing the internet […]
More on Ad Dollars per Hour
My friend Rob Leathern, over at CPM Advisors* was blogging about the same thing I was blogging about in Details, Details (unbeknownst to me, since he keeps changing where he’s blogging from.) We used the same approach, but seem to have come up with different conclusions. I don’t have time today to figure out why, […]
The 300%-500% Lift Meme
I talk to a lot of people trying to make internet advertising more effective, most of them startups or people socializing a new idea before starting a company. Over the past two years, I think about two-thirds of them have told me that their new technology/process is going to provide a “300%-500% lift.” I even […]
Those projects that come to nothing
After I pulled data from umpteen sources and crunched it for Details, Details, I looked at the resulting graph and saw that I had found… nothing. If I was a journalist, I’m sure my hard-bitten, cigar-chomping editor would have chewed me out, “There’s no story here, Neumann!” But that’s the way it is. I was […]
No starting gun
Chris Dixon’s blog post, The Ideal Startup Career Path is spot on: if you want to start a company, go work for a startup. I’d add: find a company started by someone who comes out of the entrepreneurial community and has a really big idea, join as early in the company’s lifecycle as possible, and […]
Details, details
“An important lesson… is that details may matter.” – Kyle Bagwell, The Economic Analysis of Advertising Supply in the ad market market is impressions created, people seeing an ad. Everything else can be viewed in terms of this. Demand is impressions bought. Supply = Impressions created = Hours viewing media x Impressions per hour Demand […]
Two (More) Hypotheses on Low Online CPMs
1. If low online CPMs were a result of oversupply, why haven’t CPMs in other media dropped by the same amounts? If oversupply were why prices are so low, not efficacy, then online media would be a substitute for other media and ad spend would shift to the low-cost medium, equalizing prices. This is not […]
Media has always been an attention economy
My friend John Krystynak finally got around to reading my old post, Supply of What?. In it I argue that a surplus of advertising inventory online is not the cause of low CPMs. He vehemently disagrees: First you say “there is not appreciably more inventory”. HA. Prima Facie ridiculous. Are you talking about online? THERE’S […]