Monday, February 23, 2009
Rubicon: CPMs Flat, Seeing Revenue Growth
Los Angeles-based Rubicon Project, the venture funded online advertising effort run by Frank Addante, is reporting this morning that advertising CPMs were flat in Q4, even as the firm said it had an 30 percent growth in revenue across its publishers. Rubicon, which is backed by Clearstone Ventures, Mayfield, and IDG Ventures, publishes its market report every quarter, examining the online advertising industry. Other tidbits from the report: CPMS for dating sites dropped by more than 40 percent in the quarter, but were up by 50 percent in the Young Adult category; interest in the Presidential election drove a huge increase in pageviews on news sites during the quarter; and entertainment focus sites saw a huge increase in inventory, with a corresponding drop in CPMS, by more than 15 percent. On the entertainment side, Rubicon said that there was a "flood" of inventory into the system, with new celebrity gossip blogs, photo sites, fashion, and more, which pushed down the CPMs for that category; despite the drop, the firm also said that publishers are seeing a 70% revenue growth despite the lower CPMs for their properties. Rubicon Project develops automated software and services which optimizes the CPM paid to online advertisers, by choosing the best online advertising to run on publisher web sites.