Nothing new about this in one sense ... ad inventory has been at a premium for months and is among the top drivers of the push for more video with its 15-second broadband bookends and the move to ad-supported video for sites like CNN. Still, when OMD Digital’s Sean Finnegan tells the Journal it’s heading into “Super Bowl territory,” we’ve entered another realm. Is it hype if it’s true? It is if it leads people to think we’re in a gold rush and, in turn, to another round of Sutters’ Mill mania. But players and observers say it’s different this time around given the amount of data and the kind of metrics available.
The Journal has some good color and lots of numbers about skyrocketing rates: Ad buyers say prime real estate at car buying sites is booked for 18 months and Yahoo, AOL and MSN’s big displays are sold out for months. MSN is selling 24 hours of front-page real estate for several hundred thousand to a million compared to a high end of $50,000 in 2001.
Some contrasts compiled by the Journal: the average price of a 30-second TV ad for last February’s Super Bowl was $2.4 million, while a full-page color ad in People magazine costs $228,275. A 30-second spot on this week’s episode of ABC’s “Desperate Housewives,” which had 26.5 million viewers, cost $574,504, according to Nielsen Monitor-Plus.”
Even though the vast majority of internet advertising goes to the top 50 sites, the combination of inventory shortage and better targeting methods is sending dollars to smaller sites.