Media Mandible

Pete Spande has posted an interesting discussion of the difference between print CPMs and online CPMs, kicked off by Scott Karp’s essay on why he thinks print readers are more valuable (to the NYT, at least) than online readers.

Scott’s argument is completely off-base: “There’s one other choice that you don’t often hear discussed: Find new ways to create value for advertisers online.” Now, maybe it’s just the funny little circles I run in, but I would say that finding new ways to create values for advertisers online is the most enthusiastically discussed and hotly debated topic of the publishing and advertising industries right now.

Scott also says that the list of advertising options on the NYT “seems like an impressive product list at first, but what it boils down to is a fancy list of display ad offerings.”

I don’t know if Scott has ever bought advertising space on NYT.com before, but I have. As large online publishers go, they are more advanced than most in terms of the ad formats they offer and the way they sell them. That ‘big ad’ might seem like just a smaller, digitized version of a newspaper ad to someone who has no experience placing or tracking it. But when it’s part of a “surround session,” in which a behaviorally-target user is repeatedly blasted with the ad, regardless of what content they are viewing, it can be formidable. NYT.com also has some very popular video content, which they sell in dynamic packages that involve other content as well.

Scott talks about the NYT’s $144 CPM, as compared to CPMs on TechCrunch in the $15-$40 range. Pete points out a number of problems with this, but here’s one more.

If you only want to run 1,000 impressions on TechCrunch, you can log in to the Federated portal and pay your $40 and get it done. You can’t do that with the NYT print edition, and the reason why has nothing to do with the value of the readers. It’s simply not practical for print advertisers to sell ad inventory in quantities that small. Back in the pre-online days, “CPM” had a whole different meaning (and for print, it still has that meaning). When you talk about a print CPM, you’re talking at the same level of abstraction as if you were discussing the price of a single barrel of oil purchased from Exxon. Knowing that the price is $12 per barrel is good to know if you’re looking to buy oil, but never will you say: “That’s great, because I’ve got $25 in my pocket right now. Two barrels, please.”

CPM for a newspaper is just a way of helping the buyer and the seller talk about the size of what’s being purchased. It might be used to decide how often the ad should run, or how big the ad should be, or whether or not to run the ad at all. But it isn’t used to decide the minimum number of exposures that the ad is going to get. That is already built into the paper’s circulation numbers. You might be able to restrict your ad to, say, the NYC metro area, but that’s the best you can do.

What we really need are new standards for measuring what it means to run an ad online…or a widely-embraced reinterpretation of the old standards.