Most advertising networks have clauses in their agreements that prevent disclosing how much income a site receives- I'm not doing dollar figures. I am opening the doors a little to share how VideoSift pays the bills.

CPM Networks

The pie chart above represents all the income we received for the month of September. The wedges show what percentage each source of income represents. The bulk of our monthly income comes from CPM networks. A CPM network is an ad company that pays based on the number of times their ads have been seen displayed on a site. "CPM" is an abbreviation for "Cost per Thousand", with the "M" being the roman numeral for 1,000. So, for every 1,000 views they might give us, say $1.00. So if we get 100,000 page views in a day- we would theoretically receive $100 - if we were always displaying the CPM ads from that network. It never works out quite like that, but that's the basic idea.


As you can see in the pie chart, Glam is the biggest source of income for us with a whopping 59%. Glam is a "vertical advertising network", meaning they market to a particular demographic- ladies. If you have been on the Sift for a while you might have seen quite a few ads for Macy's sales, shampoo and eyeliner. As I think we're probably at most only around 15% female on the Sift- you can understand that those ads did not perform exceptionally well. Lucky for us, Glam recently established a "male vertical network" called Brash (still sounds like it was named by a girl). We're lucky to be in the network- because frankly, they pay most of the bills - and the ads are pretty good and relevant to us.

Daisy Chaining and Geo-targeting

Here's a bit more info on how the mechanics of serving ads on the Sift works. We use Google's free (not very well publicized) solution for serving ads, Google Ad manager. It performs the same functions as other ad platforms that charge a lot of money. The most important feature they have aside from tracking our impressions is geo-targeting. That means that depending on where a Visitor is coming from in the world, we can serve a different ad network. Glam, for example- only serves ads to North America. So for international visitors to the Sift (me), Google Ad manager skips Glam and goes to our next ad network, Tribal Fusion - a non-vertical network, which serves globally. We could let Glam do this - basically they reject the ad, and we tell them which ad network to send the impression to next - but it saves time and user bandwidth to preemptively direct them to the ad network that we think will serve the ad.

This brings us to daisy chaining. It means that we hook ad networks together based on which one will be more likely to serve an ad- and provide the highest income for the impression. Our daisy chain for ads served in North America looks like this:



So if the ad is rejected by Glam, it gets automatically passed to Tribal Fusion- and if TF doesn't want the impression it goes to the last stop- Adsense (they'll take pretty much all impressions). Ads may be passed to a lower tiered network for more than just geographical reasons. Many Advertisers (and therefore networks) specify a "frequency cap", meaning that they don't want their ad displayed to the same person more than 3 times a day (for example). A somewhat mysterious part of this- is that it might not be just on the Sift. If the user saw an ad on Engadget, for example, and then came to VideoSift- the frequency cap may kick in. Yes, the networks track your visits across sites

Adsense

A word about Google's 800 pound advertising gorilla, Adsense. It's not a CPM network, it's a CPC or "Cost per Click" network. This means that every time someone clicks on an ad- we get a bit of change, but we don't get anyting for just displaying the ad. Many publishers have a love/hate relationship with Adsense, because although they may not pay that well for large, non-topic-specific sites like VideoSift- at least they pay something and you are able to monetize all your pages a little bit. The "hate" part comes from the fact that click-through rates are very low and nefarious companies (I'm looking at you Evony) use Adsense as a stealth, very low cost CPM network- because they get heaps of free display advertising without clicks, and their brand becomes very well known.

So that's how our advertising works. We wish that the pie chart was reversed and Charter memberships made the bulk of our income, but we do appreciate the income that it does bring in. For now, advertising is a very necessary part of VideoSift. I wanted to share this because I'm still learning about the process- and although I read a lot and try and tweak things for the better- there may be some Sifters out there with some insights or hints that could help us out a bit.