When Will Ad Networks Learn?

July 29th, 2006 by Chris

One of the things that makes Adsense successful is that they do not include traffic requirements. One of the reasons Adsense has been such a boon to publishers is that it allows them to profit off of sites that are too small to get into other ad networks.

Small sites are not necessarily bad, just small. The fact is not every niche can support a large amount of traffic. Your site can be good, one of the best in your niche, but if your niche is so small or so specialized you might not ever get enough traffic to gain entrance into some of the better ad networks.

Take Tribal Fusion for instance, I got this email from them on Friday:

Dear Christopher,

We contacted you recently about falling below our required amount of 2,000 unique users per day. This requirement is in place to ensure that we can continue to command the highest possible CPMs for our publishers.

Unfortunately, we haven’t seen the necessary increase in traffic and are forced to give notice that we have (or will shortly) retire Wilderness Survival from the Tribal Fusion Marketplace. At that time, the ad tags for Wilderness Survival will no longer serve any paid advertisements from Tribal Fusion. To prevent broken ads from appearing, please remove Tribal Fusion’s ad code from the Wilderness Survival website and/or from your ad serving system immediately.

We value the content of Wilderness Survival, and would love to work with you again if you are able to generate and/or allocate increased levels of unique users.

Best regards,
Tribal Fusion Publisher Support

My survival website is the #1 website in it’s niche. It has been #1 on every search engine for “wilderness survival” for 5 years. It has been #1 for “survival” on Google for 3 years. It has had numerous national media mentions. Yet, despite all of this, it only gets around 1900 uniques a day. When I signed it up with Tribal Fusion they only required 1000 uniques per day, so it fit then, but they raised their requirements. Additionally its not like I’m using Tribal Fusion for defaults, they’re #1 in my chain.

I of course sent them an email back explaining all of this, and explaining of course my position in the publisher industry, in fact I know at least a few of their employees know I’m influential. In anycase I hope they reconsider, but the fact that they would even send me that email shows that ad networks simply have not learned how to cater to smaller niches.

I have niche sites that are so small that they can’t even muster 1000 page views a day, and yet with contextual ad networks they pull in eCPMs in the $50 range. It is extremely high quality traffic in a very profitable niche and yet I doubt any traditional ad network would touch it.

Now sure, traffic requirements do make sense. A general audience site with small amounts of traffic isn’t going to be worth the effort of administrating it’s placement in your network. However quality should be the ultimate barometer of whether or not a site is included, otherwise ad networks will not be able to serve certain niches at all because no site in the niche can meet their requirements.

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Posted in: Ad Networks »  by: Chris

2 Responses to “When Will Ad Networks Learn?”

  1. Peter  Says:
    July 30th, 2006 at 8:43 am

    Certainly is room for someone to come in and take all that business. The Adsense of the banner network world. Someone like you, Chris, should step up and do it. ;)

  2. Ben  Says:
    October 30th, 2006 at 5:33 am

    Have you considered that the reduced visitors was directly related to TribalFusion?

    I refuse to remain loyal to any website that starts to use TribalFusion. They use under-handed techniques to advertise to web users.

    They deliberately attempt to circumvent pop-up blockers, and they associate with companies that promote spyware (see Smiley Central).

    You are better off without them.

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