Problems for small sites

From: Jeremy Swinfen Green <swinfen_at_btopenworld.com>
Date: Tue 14 Jan 2003 13:24:08 -0600

Janet Attard makes some interesting points and I would like to
follow up with a fact from the UK. Here we see approximately
80% of advertising spend going to the top 10 sites. This is
for several reasons: partly as Janet says because advertisers
want lots of impressions and small sites don't deliver this but
also, it has to be said, because media agencies often have
difficulties managing relationships with too many sites. (After
all they could deliver large numbers of targetted impressions
by buying multiple appropriate sites.)

Even at my company, i-level, where we spend less than 30% of
our clients money on those top ten sites, we only place
advertising with about 500 sites (plus a few more hundred who
are sold by the networks). That leaves literally thousands of
sites who don't see our money (and we are one of the biggest
digital buying points in the UK).

What's the solution for these small sites? Well, I think it
comes down to two things: education and direct selling.

Education because once advertisers, big and small, start to
realise that the branding effects of internet advertising do
exist, then they will start to use the web more. Currently
small local advertisers tend to use local press, local
cinema and a bit of outdoor. (Not much TV because there is
not much local cable in the UK.) Our local advertisers don't
expect people to walk out of the cinema into the Indian
restaurant, Automobile retailer, or whatever as soon as they
see an ad in the cinema so why do they expect the web to
deliver visitors to their web site when they see the ad? So
the key for local and specialist sites has to be persuading
advertisers to treat the web like they would say local
newspapers - as something that pushes a certain service to
the front of the mind, to be accessed at a later, appropriate
moment.

And direct selling because local and specialist sites have a
very relevant offer to certain advertisers (say, local
retailers for a local news site) and are likely to get more
money for this type of targetted activity than they would if
they relied on one of the networks to sell their inventory at
bottom of the barrel prices to large advertisers looking for
large numbers of relatively untarggeted users.

Just my 2p!

Jeremy Swinfen Green
i-level generator, London
www.i-level.com; www.siteclinic.co.uk




Received on Tue Jan 14 2003 - 13:24:08 CST