Let’s Kill The CPM

Editor's note : This guest post is written by Shelby Bonnie , the CEO of Whiskey Media . He co-founded CNET in 1993 and was the Chairman and CEO from 2000 to 2006. He served as Chairman of the IAB from 2001 to 2003. OK, Advertising Week just ended ... does anyone else feel like the online advertising industry is the orchestra, playing on while the Titanic is sinking? We have a problem, folks. And I, for one, think we should start to fix it by killing off the CPM , once and for all. I have been in the Internet media space for 16 years and will start by stating the obvious: The CPM has done more to stunt innovation and drag down quality products than any single thing on the Internet. Maybe it works in other mediums, but it sure as hell doesn't work on the Internet. Having been both a small and big publisher (now small again), it's been my experience that the collective focus on CPMs and counting eyeballs by marketers, agencies, and publishers has led to a whole mess of unintended consequences that have produced a series of "solutions" that work for none of those parties. And perhaps more importantly, it's been terrible for users. All campaigns start with the best of intentions: "let's do something creative, engaging, and unique!" But unless someone really senior from the agency or client side intervenes, the road for a campaign always leads to the media buyer and the dreaded spreadsheet, where the two most important columns are impressions and cost. Ironically, there's usually some good stuff in campaigns, but they are thrown in for free as "value adds." At some point, publishers decide that if all clients care about is impressions, then OK, we'll give them impressions. The output is an industry that overproduces shallow, superficial, commoditized impressions. Why do we have so many bad sites that republish the same junky content--content that's often made by machines or $1-per-post contractors? Why do sites intentionally try to get us to turn lots of pages with tons of top 10 lists, photo galleries, or single-paragraph summaries of someone else's story ? TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco