By now you’ve got a mountain of holiday cards from friends and family piled on your table (or stuck on your refrigerator or tacked up on your bulletin board). My favorites are any of the many variations on the “seasons greetings” template with a spot for a picture of the kids and/or pets, often in matching holiday garb. Is that peach fuzz I see on Danny’s face? When did Rebecca start wearing braces? Do you think the Phillips’ new Jack Russell will get along with their Rottweiler? I have an accumulation of these things from holidays past and love to sift through them–solid and meaningful markers of time. Most say no more than something like “happy holidays, love Danny, Rebecca, Jack and Rex,” but they speak volumes.

I compare this year’s Right Media family holiday card to last year’s and feel exactly the same way. It’s been a tremendous year for us. We’ve grown like mad in every respect–from clients, to the volume of trading on the Exchange, to employees. The pictures on the cards say it. They show our family (ok, they also list all of the cities we’re in now on the inside), but they clearly tell the world about how much we’ve grown in all of these ways.

We’ll see if our design department can get everyone’s picture on the front of next year’s card. My guess is that it won’t be easy, with or without matching holiday garb.

Happy new year.

Last year’s card:

This year’s card:

There’s lots of chatter about the need for a better metric standard than the page view. My colleague, Pat McCarthy, offers a nice summary as well as suggestions for alternatives to the embattled page view. Another interesting discussion is evolving where the page view is dead (illustration), and we are now also mourning the Death of the User.

I wrote a column on this 2.5 years ago (Pricing Your Identifiable Audience) arguing that advertisers buy people, not ads (let alone, pages), so we need to measure impressions actually made on people, not impressions served to pages. My context at the time was data-enabled targeting, which publishers can use to better identify and price different segments of their audience based on measurable value to advertisers.

This is a difficult business. Web publishing is too measurable when it suits our interests (advertiser unhappy with results) and always inconsistent from one source to the next.

Publishers only need to be concerned about a few internal metrics. Pat offers “revenue per unique user” as a meaningful indicator of a site’s ability to effectively monetize its audience over time. This is also a good way to speak to your advertisers, as in “(fill in the metric) per unique audience.” If you have confidence in your ability to apply effective frequency caps, you gain an edge over competitors who pulverize their visitors with uncapped ads long after someone has responded or shown that they never will.

Which brings us to the one truth: results. If advertisers do their jobs right, and you do yours, then you should be able to offer the right result for the right price. Can you show your advertisers a range of acceptable metrics that demonstrate the proper exchange of results they seek for value you receive? Do you know the value of an impression on your site as well as the correct price that will produce, for example, a new customer acquisition at or below the targeted cost by type of offer?

That’s a whole lot of data. It’s worth figuring out how to extract and use it. One way you can leapfrog your competitors in knowledge that improves performance is through open API’s that allow you to use non-personally identifiable data in ad server decisioning. Why fight the page views battle when you can win the war for results?

This is the second installment of our interview with Jerri Gillean, our business development manager here for RMX Direct. We’re talking to her about what she hears from publishers who are new to RMX Direct. If you missed our first part, you can take a look at it here.

—

VP: Jerri, why don’t you say a little more about those first days with publishers as they’re just getting started with RMX Direct.

Jerri: Everyone wants to know: what will my CPM be? Here is something I share with them: I mention that there are many different factors that affect your CPM– (more…)

Yep, the winter holiday season is upon us.

A number of us will be visiting our original stomping grounds–or visiting our in-laws. I wish that we all may get exactly what we want during this season–may everything fit, may it be the right color and size…

With that in mind, here are a few presents that I wish someone could give to all those non-RMX direct publishers out there: (more…)

Let me introduce you to Jerri.

She is our charismatic, energetic, business development manager for RMX Direct.

When you’re in sales, you have to be that way.

In addition to riding horses (you can see her blog and videos on it here) she has also been rustling up a number of new publishers to try RMX Direct. And succeeding. Maybe that contributed to the new daily impressions record we just broke last week (and then broke again later in the week)… but that’s for another post. (more…)