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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (69323)	10/20/1999 5:19:00 PM
From: AurumRabosa	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 132070

Nadine, Thanks for the link. He didn't mention that the main benefit advertisers get from their banner ads is brand or name recognition. Click-thru rates have plummeted from about 3% a couple of years ago to 0.7% last summer. Studies have shown that seeing the same ad the 3rd time is the most effective in terms of remembering the brand name and the 7th time adds nothing and the banner is dead to that viewer. Advertising rates have also dropped a lot and unsold inventory has risen a lot. If you look at the media kits (NY Times has the best I've seen) you'll see a rate like $35 cpm (per thousand views) which is down from $45-55 sites were asking a few years ago. However, they can't sell all their inventory and so they sell it at firesale prices or auction it off for rates that run $5-12 cpm in bulk. And they still can't sell all of it hence so many charity and house ads to fill the unsold space. Sorry to bore you with my trivia dump but my partners and I are building a web site and we tore our hair out debating whether to have a subscription site or a free site supported by advertising. I won out and we'll have the latter, someday maybe. Any web site that depends on ad revenues for their primary income is doomed! WRT the NY Times article today I find it fraudulent that any officer of a public company would lead investors to believe revenues were up by cooking the books with barter sales. Then they bury the fact that it's barter sales in the deepest darkest recesses of their footnotes in the finest print they can. I think this practice will end when someone wins a large class-action law suit against one of these deviants.