ONLINE-ADS>> New Ad Model - LESS Accountability

rhoy_at_tenagra.com
Tue, 8 Oct 1996 07:57:40 -0500

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Hi all,

Last week I was at a medical conference in New Orleans supporting one of our clients. I ran across the people who broker ad space for The New York Times' Your Health Daily <http://yourhealthdaily.com/> - a web site focusing on consumer oriented health news. About a month ago they offered us a week of free advertising for one of our clients. We took them up on it, but found that the price was quite high ($6,000 for a non-exclusive banner) and that it brought us little traffic for the price. Also, they sell space per month, not by number of impressions.

When I explained our reasons for rejecting this ad buy to the rep, he explained to me The New York Times's online advertising model. If some of you thought Modem Media's model was bad, wait until you hear this.

Essentially, The New York Times has decided to charge a flat rate for online ad space, just like in print. They will not sell by impressions; and in fact can't even tell you how many impressions your ad received. Their reasoning is that AOL users are a significant force on the Internet, and AOL both cashes and mirrors web sites (including Your Health Daily). Because of this cashing and mirroring, no one really knows exactly how many times any web page is being shown.

When they first realized that AOL's cashing and mirroring was affecting things, The New York Times approached AOL requesting specific figures; but AOL's said we don't know either. This sounds funny at first, but I talked to our system administrator at Tenagra and he says that is probably true. When you are producing gigabytes of access log data a day (as in AOL's case) it becomes unmanageable pretty quickly. Moreover, there is no real incentive to manage that data because the only reason AOL is cashing and mirroring in the first place is to make things faster for their users.

Rather than fight with AOL to get exact numbers, which is probably impossible anyway, The New York Times has decided their online advertising model is to make you pay for the name "The New York Times."

I am curious what everyone thinks, as we just finished a debate of being MORE accountable.

richard
moderator

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