Online ad rates drop for third month in a row

PubMatic report is based on 3,500 Web sites

[signor_john]

According to Online Media Daily, a PubMatic survey of 3,500 Web sites shows a modest drop in CPMs from online ad networks over the past several months. in June, small Web sites (less than 1M PVs/mo) dropped $0.32 cents from May to June. On the other hand, medium Web sites (1-100M PVs/mo) rose 13 cents, while large Web sites (100M+ PVs/mo) improved by 2 cents in June. News sites fared worst of all the verticals surveyed, dropping from $1.10 in May to 48 cents in June.

What I find striking is how abysmally low the numbers were: CPMs were 81 cents (small sites), 46 cents (medium sites), and 23 cents (large sites) in June. Are those numbers in line with what people here are seeing?

You can read the full story here [mediapost.com].

[FattyB]

For us it depends on what you are looking at. Overall our CPMs (talking about all non-contextual advertising in this) are probably below $1. But if you remove non-English traffic then it goes to a minimum of $2 on our main news site, that is with 100% fill.

Main site (medium sized news and entertainment) has a two-year min cpm of $2 net for all English traffic, kinda glad I signed it now that recession look here/likely.

On our small size site...tech news sees around $2 net average for English traffic from general networks like Tribal Fusion. I expect that to rise as the site gets more established and can pickup more lucrative campaigns.

The only places I see big drops has been Google Adsense and Vibrant Media, not the CPM banner market.

I am seeing less branding requests (like custom headers and pages altered to match banner campaigns) but that might just be because we switched ad company and not selling us properly yet.

Finally on our German language site I think CPM is on the way up as the site gets bigger. But that is not to say CPMs are not falling, just we are moving up a tier.

What normally happens in a recession with online advertising? Was .com bubble not what caused all the crazy intrusive ad formats? Webmaster's desperate for ad revenue agreeing to all sorts or?

[edited by: FattyB at 6:32 pm (utc) on July 15, 2008]