Online Ad Inventory

The Internet Generates so Many Page Impressions Every Hour That It's Almost an Unlimited Amount of Ad Inventory.

Ad inventory means places where different ads can be placed in emails, on pages across the desktop and mobile Internet and in videos, etc...

90% of ad inventory is not sold each month. What that means is of every 1000 possible ad placement impressions, roughly 100 ads are sold usually under a CPV, CPM or CPC revenue model.

The other 900 in every 1000 ad impressions are sold under a CPA advertising model.

This is where publishers run ads they don't get paid for unless an ad yields the advertiser a specific result; usually, a lead or sale after the click.

The Internet Bubble Bursting Back in the 90's Came About Through Online Advertising Gone Wild.

Google emerged from the dust storm as the new micro-soft with their pay per click advertising model.

Prior to this, companies like Yahoo sold ad inventory by CPM only.

Advertisers with deep pockets were paying hundreds of dollars per CPM (that's $100 for a banner ad showing on a web page 1000 times), if that banner yielded a click through rate (CTR) of 1%, that's $10 per click.

We know today that similar ads are being purchased for less than $0.50 cents per click, that's more than 20 years later.

If you look at online advertising this way, it's not very hard at all to understand why the web 1.0 bubble burst.

Audience

Unlike TV or radio where an audience is interrupted by advertisements we have to consume, like it or not, the Internet provides a mediUM by which our consumption is by page.

Something like 60+ trillion links connect web pages across the Internet and each time we click one, we see a different page.

Most pages contain no more than 10 advertising placements.

Only a few ads sit in the premium placements above the fold; of all ads, nearly 90% of ads clicked with commercial intent belong to the premium ad placements on each page.

Internet advertisement would be the equivalent of placing different ads on every scene in a TV show reel, except, instead of shows, entire audience watching thousands of scenes in sequential order; individuals consume each scene in their own time, searching by keyword and clicking organic text links or ads, linking from scene to scene.