Media fragmentation: long-tail websites and the advent of ad networks
Media fragmentation: long-tail websites and the advent of ad networks
Before data driven and real time advertising, advertisers who only had traditional campaigns available struggled to detect the target audience over all the spots available on the web.
As a result, only the most visited websites benefit from a generous number of campaigns, while blogs and small-medium sites that generate limited volumes of inventory find themselves with many ad slots to monetize, considering that the audience is potentially the same as that visiting a famous website.
The remaining available inventory that buyers didn’t buy is called “unsold“.
The web is full of websites that lack a million page views a month, but have valuable vertical content where a varied niche of people express their interests.
This phenomenon is called the long tail, and has two main meanings when considering the inventory:
– Long tail for websites with low visibility due to small volumes of traffic, which tend to stay out from the media plan.
– And, long tail refers to all the ad spaces in the inventory that are tough to sell, such as internal pages or specific sections.
To try to solve the problem of the long tail, the “ad network” rose to sell what was tough to sell, which was the original high-volume, low price option for serving display ads at scale.
