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Yahoo’s APEX … What could have been
Yahoo’s shares was sitting at less than 40% lower than when Microsoft offered the Magic US $47.5 million.
Out of that seemingly impossible situation came the APEX project – An open to all and for all Banner Exchange service. The key it seemed will be a dashboard based on a simple and transparent format where many of Yahoo’s content network partners of close to 800 publishers and content websites can freely buy and sell Banners as they see fit.
The one major innovation here it seems is no need to necessarily meddle with Middle men like Agencies to get your Banner out for your desired “Reach & Frequency” Outcomes. It seems they could potentially use the Y! Profiles to also anonymously gather and use Demographic data from say … Yahoo 360 and such.
Let’s say you intend to target 40-50 year old with an interest in Golfing … log in Y! APEX, click a few buttons, key in your budgets and suddenly … you now can assess where and potentially how often your Banners pop up.
Questions is will there be specific sites being offered for advertising or grouping of sites that offer clusters of Properties that where you can advertise on?
My Take on Yahoo is that they have a fairly solid platform of offerings of their own starting out with Yahoo Groups, then 360 and such over the last 10 years or so. Sadly also 360 is no more. The issue I see is the actual monetization platform may not work as well … unless perhaps APEX had kicked in with all the promises that are riding off of it as the Adsense/DoubleClick Contender.
I read on Business Week some months ago that Google would have made $16.2 billion in revenue this year and Yahoo’s $5.6B So there is a lot of money on the table and as much as we all see that Digital Pie growing, it still about who gets the biggest slice.
More important is how to ensure that the value chain of publishers, media sellers and those who eventually buy that digital media can work within this Exchange. My feeling here is that the exchange can be good in the sense that if offers a lot of digital collateral for sale/buy and hence makes the media agency’s work easier.
The issue is still however the smart marketing media buying strategy that direct clients and their agency reps will use to make that buy. How do you split the digital media budgets amongst a full spectrum of publishers?
Well thank you for asking.
Hitwise uses their online tracking of how 25 million internet users consume data to provide that 3rd party objectivity to underpin their media buy decision. Looking at where the attention moves from one website to another is what Hitwise calls Clickstream. When you deal with literally million of internet users in any one of the 6 countries Hitwise tracks data in, it is easy to make that strategic and tactical Branding, optin or below the line digital media buying decision.
Ok, I might be digressing as we are after all talking about what this means an “open” digital exchange.
Fact it, online spend in HK and SG for example only accounts for less than 2% of total marketing spend. This means there is a lot more sitting in the offline budgets. This takes me to my favorite subject of Exposure, Visibility and the Monetisation of that attention.
Please stay posted and I will publish my views and ideas philosophy on what is effectively a similar model for offline TV and Radio. So simple if you use the understanding of traditional media to understand the online business model.
A bientot,
Dan
