RMX Direct just had a quiet little Winter Holiday party a few nights ago at a quiet little restaurant here in Eugene, Oregon. This year, we actually had a ‘casino night’ theme, with play money. A certain amount goes to a charity (for more pictures, check out our RMX Direct User’s group on flickr).

But here’s a thought: To have a successful website, it takes thought and strategy, design and marketing–and patience: observing what content works for your users, and what doesn’t. Now, let’s also say you didn’t want to gamble with your website’s monetization’s approaches. If you found out you were taking chances you didn’t need to, you’d change your strategies mighty quick…right?

If you find yourself doing any of the following, you’re unknowingly gambling some of your website’s value away:

• If you’re trying to manage all your ad networks ‘on your own’–guessing who will pay the most for your different ads as it regards their sizes, their regions, their frequencies, etc.

• If you’re trying to manage your ad networks through ‘daisy chains’ (educated guesses)

• If you’re trying to manage your ad networks through ‘weighting’ (not a sure bet, just guesses).

When aren’t you gambling?

• When everyone can see each other’s cards: a standard of transparency and openess.

• When everyone has equal access to the impressions you serve: networks have the same access, seeing impressions at the same time, bidding on them automatically.

• When competition is fueling the bidding–people see special value in your impressions’ uniqueness, so this drives the bidding. And this makes your impression value increase.

• When you can rank your co-members, so they know what you like–and dislike–about their service. And those co-member/networks welcome that feedback because they only want to do better business with you.

I am talking about RMX Direct. It’s the most effective, efficient–and rationale–way to handle your online advertising. We’re not here for our users to take chances–we’re here to help them be successful.

Every winter, our carpet “remnants” come up from the basement to absorb mud and snow inside every entrance to my home. My wife’s a stickler for neatness, so when you enter my house, your shoes come off. But the remnants sit there for a few months every year to catch whatever slush visitors manage to sneak past border patrol.

Useful? Yes. Valuable? In so far as they protect the flooring beneath them, sure. But calling them “remnant” implies that they have no intrinsic value. They’re leftover, unsuitable for any number of reasons, including odd size, color, uneven cut, pulls, holes, etc.

Is this how you think about some of your inventory? If it’s unsold, it’s available inventory. Maybe it’s harder to sell than your most desirable placements because it’s below the fold, deep inside a section of user generated content, or on a browser in Southeast Asia. But it does have value - probably a lot more than you think it does.

In a booming online ad marketplace, publishers often settle for a few checks from the networks that resell their “remnants.” But publishers are waking to a new reality - that undersold, available, non-premium inventory deserves a real strategy. Here’s why:

- Many publishers sell only a fraction of their total inventory at rate card value. This leaves sites with hundreds of millions, even billions, of available impressions.

- Direct response (DR) advertising online is enormous and growing. Thousands of DR advertisers will test your inventory and they will compete among themselves to pay you handsomely for inventory that meets their goals.

- It’s easy to introduce competition for your available inventory, scale a non-premium ad business, ensure successful performance, and manage it all efficiently.

Right Media’s Publisher Media Exchange (PMX) enables large publishers to execute a strategy for increasing the amount of profitable revenue they derive from non-premium inventory. Prior to creating an open media exchange, these companies share such challenges as: unsold inventory, especially in international markets; inefficient inventory management due to existing ad server’s inability to handle the special demands of non-premium inventory; loss of impressions and revenue to complex, multi-network daisy chains; lack of advertiser and price visibility. Following are some examples of how PMX addresses these and other issues:
- Achieving scale efficiently

Source here

- Monetizing all inventory
A publisher generates 500-million impressions outside the U.S. and barely monetizes any of it. Within six months of introducing competition for every impression, they realize $50,000 to $60,000 per month for the same inventory that previously produced nothing.

- Creating competition among networks
A publisher working with five networks turned a daisy chain into an array of networks. Every impression now invites competitive bids from the original networks plus additional partners. Revenue for the same inventory increased by more than 30 percent in the first 90 days.

Are you allowing visitors to walk all over your “remnants” as they do in my house? Let’s start thinking about our available inventory as assets and accepting nothing less than full market value for every one.

I recently attended an IAB Innovators Round Table dinner, hosted by Right Media, which brought together online publishers of all sizes. Over 20 online publishers gathered to discuss how to distinguish between premium and non-premium inventory and how to best monetize both while protecting their brand.

There were varying opinions on how to manage non-premium inventory (what some call remnant or wholesale inventory), but there was general agreement on its definition–that it’s simply “unsold” inventory. Now that we all knew what it was, we tackled what to do with it.

The solutions on how to manage inventory varied greatly but there seemed to be widespread agreement that yield management is labor intensive and ad networks don’t really make it any easier. Everyone had a frustrating story of seeing unacceptable ads appearing on their sites and expressed the desire to have pre-emptive controls over creatives rather being limited to reacting to a network’s mistake.

The subject of who should own yield management produced the liveliest debate of the evening, with answers ranging from sales to ad ops to finance to “not me.” In the end everyone agreed it ultimately belonged in the hands of finance. The thinking was that selling remnant inventory is far too subjective to be handled by sales or ad ops and that finance is best able to fit remnant into a larger business plan. The supporting view seemed to be “anyone but sales!”

There was at least one topic that no one agreed on: how to best incentivize ad ops. Have you ever heard of an ad ops team (an Army of One) that was under-worked? Publishers need sales and ad ops working in unison and yield management too often saps the morale out of what should be a collaborative effort focused foremost on premium sponsorships.

How do you define remnant inventory? Who owns yield management in your organization? What controls do you have over the types of ads running in your remnant inventory? And what is your ad ops team saying about your response to these questions?

Try this conversation over dinner with your team one night. You might just come up with some new solutions.

Web 2.0 and social-networking sites may be all the rage, but do not forget nor underestimate the importance of the humble email site. That’s where online community movements began when the internet was still new. With that, this month’s RMX Direct featured publisher is from down under, in Australia: Bruce Davey of Fastmail.FM. (more…)

Asked by an analyst about the relative pricing between print and online for help wanted, Tribune’s president Scott Smith said, “What we’ve done is aggressively raise online prices, keep print prices relatively stable. If you looked at a big market today, you’d see an average print ad costs about what an average online ad costs” (story).

Wow. While he’s talking about a specific set of comparable ads (help wanteds in print and online), this is still amazing. Not too long ago online was the “value-added” or “bonus” exposure that print, radio and TV sales reps tacked onto deals for their advertisers. Newspaper sales execs once famously faced an exquisite option: sell a $100,000 full page ad and call it a day, or develop, present and implement a creative online program with multiple placements, response methods and metrics to run over a period of time for one tenth the revenue. Not much of a choice for a leisure-loving sales rep.

It’s still a publisher’s duty to make smart choices about monetizing every impression according to value provided. The good news is that the market now recognizes the value of online media and is ready and able to pony up accordingly. The sad news for sellers of other media is that they took their dominant place in the world for granted for too long and now they’re having to catch up from an unfamiliar place at the bottom of the media buyer’s pile.

Online sellers: let’s remember that the worm can turn at any time. Keep providing value; keep demanding value; keep getting full value in return.