It should come as no surprise that the ad inventory on social networks like Facebook are not worth much. A new offer by Lookery, a startup that places ads on social apps inside Facebook and Bebo, is offering a guaranteed ad rate of 12.5 cents for every thousand impressions (CPM). The promotion, which runs through April is probably close to what Lookery can get for ads it places on Facebook. Add in 2 cents per thousand impressions for serving the ads and you get to about a 15 cent CPM. That is probably a good average for the bulk of inventory on Facebook, which makes up the vast majority of Lookery’s business.
This is a market-share play for Lookery. By offering a guaranteed rate, it hopes to attract enough application publishers to get to a billion impressions a month, up from 170 million in December. Lookery is smaller than the other major social-app ad networks, like Slide, RockYou, and Social Media. On social networks, more so even than on the Web in general, advertising is obviously a volume game. And Lookery is trying to catch up to the larger app ad networks, which may very well have higher average CPM rates, by taking all the low-hanging penny inventory that is out there.
Find out more here.
A VC friend recently passed on a similar deal that boasted an 8 cent CPM. Unsure how many page views they were doing at the time.
I signed up to advertise my site and couldnt find where to start a campain.
haha, I must have missed the point, i emailed them to delete my account.
we shall see.
ZiZi - drop me a line, we aren’t totally “automated” yet - info@lookery.com - and I will take care of you.
Rex
Advertising… I am working on it at this time… I publish in a particular sector so visits are coming only from people interested in transportation… I got 1500 visitors, 15000 page views… and a google ads financial result of 10 dollars or so…
I am not sure this is the way
at least, not for me!
@matt with our new program roll out using the stats from above, you’d at least make $56.25 in a month. Providing that you did 15,000 ad impressions daily for 30 days at our new 12.5 cent guarantee.
Rex
Interesting that Lookery and SocialMedia’s logos are so similar. And by “interesting” I mean “quite suspicious”.
atleast they are getting some exposure which is great for them
How do you rate? Check out http://www.yupnup.com
Personally, from advertiser point of view, I don’t like CPM ads because of the variability in terms of cost per click-through and non-definable value as a branding tool.
@8 right, and now that we have migrated, hit us up - we are doing all types of ads now - not just CPM. We’d love to do business.
Rex
If you play apps you see lookery ads quite often. And to be perfectly honest I’m not sure how long they will get away with the “Fake Facebook” Ads. (meaning the ads that have the facebook format and color scheme)
Rex, I don’t actually have 1 new message from a new friend that has a crush on me do I?… I clicked and apparently The Lending Club has a crush on me!
Oh me oh my, I need to call my bff…
I’m not sure what the average across apps is but socialmedia generates about a $0.40 to $0.50 eCPM for us. We’re paid on CPC but it backs out to those effective CPM rates. Perhaps other apps are seeing lower rates but $0.125 seems low based on our experience.
Videoegg is paying $5/CPM. or so their report stated. Their ads are quite a bit more complex though.
Erick, there is a lot more to this story than 12cent cpms, it just hasn’t bubbled up to the surface yet.
@brian, VideoEgg is paying $5, but not for a high percent of your traffic. For the people that want to manage multiple advertising programs, running a rotation of high-priced ads as far as they can go and working your way down the ladder will generally (though not always) get you paid a little bit more. For the people who want the whole problem to evaporate, the Guarantee is the way to go.
The Guarantee program is in addition to our current, Variable Payment program which is offered to all comers at any volume. Under that program, our publishers payments vary with our own sales and optimization success. The publishers are paid 100% of our gross proceeds up to $.20, and 50% of any gross proceeds above $.20. Our December average as a network was $0.22. When we have full-month numbers for January, they will be lower since Christmas is when many marketers pay top dollar.
@10 Issac - Apparently you haven’t been back in awhile - Lending Club’s campaign ended in mid-December if I remember correctly. As far as “Fake Facebook” ads - I don’t know what you mean there. You will have to either show something or elaborate as we don’t run anything that is considered “Fake Facebook” ads. You have me swinging on that one Issac. ?
Rex
@11 We think differently, as we are seeing where the market is heading. We believe our direction is the best to take at this time. Take a look around you beyond your computer screen, it’s not looking all that bright outside of this box.
Rex
@matt, CPI ads like my pal seth’s (socialmedia founder) work very well on some sites. congrats. If everyone’s app worked that way, we’d have a different business.
Isn’t this another example where a business could effectively become redundant in a split second if the larger network that their revenue stream depends on for whatever reason chooses to smite them?
Seems like if Facebook banned Lookery their place in the market would tank. Even a temporary suspension as a warning or whatever would be catastrophic - with advertisers and publishers suddenly having nothing.
:/
Just seems like a dangerous, eggs in one basket situation to me. Perhaps they will seek to diversify, though.
Yeah, I would be vary of a business model that relies so much on getting permission for placing ads inside facebook or Bebo.
In fact, I don’t see a good reason why Facebook/Bebo would allow this in the first place.
@yongfook We’ve got all sorts of good stuff coming that will strengthen our business and those of our partners. We try to be very good citizens and very responsive whenever there are problems, which of course there are sometimes. Hopefully, that will be enough to bridge us to a diversified business as you suggest.
@18 Facebook is just a starting point for us. We did well on fb, but as @19 stated, we are branching out - look for some of our new offerings coming up very soon. We aren’t only an ad network, so as @17 was stating - he misses the point of when you go to our blog - Demographic Marketing Services - which everyone will see very soon.
Rex
All the other ad networks pay more, for large number of impressions. I haven’t seen worse than .20, and that’s extreme.
@phil
If so, they should post competing guarantees here and take all our publishers. For publishers that share the ad market risk with us (see the description of our Variable Program above), we pay a lot more too. For people that want to be protected from the ups and downs of ad buys, we aren’t seeing guarantees from anyone else over $.10.
@21 Do they offer guarantees of 20 cents? Yes, last month everyone was doing 20 cents and higher. We even were in the mid-20’s all month. But we offer the guarantee which if you read our blog, also has a variable factor.
Rex
I take your points about an economic downturn though it remains to be seen whether we’ll see a 75% reduction in eCPM on account of that. As to socialmedia / CPI they seem to be branching out. Several of the ads that seem to be in heaviest rotation don’t point to an app at all…they’re off-network.
In any event what this post seems to suggest is that for now there’s not a tremendous amount of value in small to mid sized apps. At a 12c, 25c or even 50c CPM you need some truly significant traffic to make a meaningful business. At a 50c CPM and 1 million impressions/month you’re looking at $500 per month in revenue. Not terrible for an individual developer but not a standalone business either. Making some real money from modest apps will require more creativity than inserting a line of lookery or social media code.
@24 You are correct Matt about the 1 million a month, but we hope to free up some people from worrying about the rates going to go up or down from day to day. Leave that to us, and developers can develop the money making apps that do millions of impressions per day.
Rex
20 cent cpm? Where? Sign me up!
@26 good one Andy!
If you have time for a call tomorrow, I’d still like to talk with you a bit more, if you can.
Rex
SocialMedia has 1,475,837 apps installed (from CruchBase). Do you (Lookery) have any numbers to share?
And you should redesign the logo, too much of it is taken from the look and feel of SocialMedia’s.
How come TechCrunch hasn’t reported on the fact that India hasn’t had Internet connectivity all day?
http://www.marketing-ninja.com/?p=302
@jonah, the logos were done independently, though ours is getting prettied up a bit. Ours might have been first by a few weeks too, I’m not sure.
We don’t have any apps installed. Social Media both owns apps and runs ads for other people. We’re purely an ad network that works on others’ behalf. That said, what stats do you want. We’re rather open with data.
This model is very flawed, since Facebook could crush any of these ad networks at any time. The value of these ads is virtual nothing, and what does Rafer know about the market anyway?
Why would I use Facebook, again?
Scott, Rex: You guys need lives.
SocialMedia will dominate this space. They are ahead of the game, with the smartest people, and the best connections to FB. Everyone else is eating their scraps.
@33 We do have lives, and Lookery is a big part of it right now. As far as eating scraps, keep watching us in the next month or so - sometimes “scraps” are gold if you know what to do with them.
Rex
Check out the interview of Scott Rafer, Lookery founder, on intruders.tv
http://uk.intruders.tv/Scott-R....._a270.html
Social Media both owns apps and runs ads for other people. We’re purely an ad network that works on others’ behalf.
Fake Facebook ads are quite simple. It is an ad that looks like it is a part of Facebook. I’m not sure why you want me to elaborate as you are running the ads…In short they are Blue square button within the unit that uses the same font ans style sheet as Facebook.
I use Facebook apps several times/week so I have been around. I see the ads every time I use my favorite apps. There are other flaws in your and Social Media’s bus model besides the “fake Facebook” ads.
1. You rely on App install revenue, which is in essence VC money that is being used for Marketing
2. No significant Ad Revenue from direct sales (VideoEgg has a large sales team)
3. Relying on 3rd Party ad networks to pay you (a 3rd party ad network). This is a bad idea because they will likely circumvent you when they find out which of your apps are high traffic and you are only getting a 24% rev share on any advertisements in your network (Lookery gets 60% from VideoEgg and of the 60% from VideoEgg pays 60% to the app developer, leaving them with 24%).
Here is some free advice:
1. Start building, acquiring apps or at least get exclusive rep agreements
2. Hire an ad sales team
What most folks wont tell you is that in online ad networks (that don’t own the sites/apps) are as valuable as their ad sales team.
Hi Isaac,
We can look into making the “Fake Facebook” ads a TOS violation for our advertisers. Would that be appropriate?
By your numbers,
1. Fewer than 2% of our ads are App install ads. It was 0% until January. We’re a traditional marketing network. Lumping us in with socialmedia isn’t accurate, no matter how much we love them.
2. Correct, but we’ll have to agree to disagree. No one needs another ad sales team. We’re working our way up to serving a half billion ads per employee per month by this time next year and will have low-touch inside sales and ecommerce only. It’s a different way to get profitable.
3. If we weren’t writing a bunch of fun web services in the background to add value to the overall social network world, you’d be completely right. However, we are coding away and we believe we can use our upcoming services to secure an ongoing, high-volume, low cost-per-unit, place in this ecology.
“What most folks tell you” isn’t how innovation happens.
So far, the program is working. We’ve done more than 33M impressions in the last 35 hours. That’s more than half way to our initial goal. We reached that rate within 48 hours of the original TC post about our Guarantee.
Very resourceful. Thanks for the links!
Bookmarked it… and stumbled it.