$40K pw=$1m ea p.a (- costs) = RocketBoom Ads

hair split
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

So the Rocketboom video news H264 compliant ebay advertising auction for a week of ads went for $40K. The most interesting fork in the road I see is whether advertisers will allow the "amateur" publishers to produce their ads, rather than their standard agency. The answer will be complex and also depend on how large the publisher is, the size of the client advertising, and other demand/supply factors. Jeff Jarvis says it perfectly : "The public is valuing new media much more than the old, but the advertisers still value the old. Most every newspaper and in many cases TV networks and magazines have much larger audiences online, but the revenue for their old media properties remains much higher because the advertisers and agencies still value the old and the safe. They want metrics. They want control. They want guarantees. This, in turn, makes big publishers and producers play it safe because they don’t want to mess with the cash cow. And that means that advertisers miss the opportunity to reach a larger, younger, smarter audience in the new medium, which is — supposedly — what they’re dying to do. And that means that big media companies now face competition from a thousand Rocketbooms and a million Gawkers. That allows a TRM to come along and snatch away an opportunity from the big, lumbering giants. That is why small is the new big. Small be nimble, small be quick, small jumped over the conglomerates." I wonder what ongoing price Rocketboom will get, now its received a $40 CPM for its first week. Let's see what their sell-through rates and effective CPM's are over the year, and whether they continue to use Ebay. At the moment the 2 Rocketboomers will be pulling in $1m each a year minus production costs : Nice if you can get it ! Now I wonder what would happen if the Scoble's of this world, who are employed by GEMAYA, started auctioning ads on their blogs. Would they do it through their employer ? Donate money to charity, or...... Dave Winer, on the other hand secretly was keen to dip into the auction at the $15k-ish bracket, as a way to "promote Scripting News, my role in podcasting, and the upcoming release of the NewsRiver aggregator." - He's going to look for some opportunistic Rocketboom buying opportunities in the future.