Evidence of Online Ad Slowdown ?

Piece in TechCrunch today on the declining prices in Advertising CPMs of remnant Ads (those that cannot be sold directly and are cleared via other networks) from Pubmatic, an online ad optimization service.

In the fourth quarter of 2008, the average price for remnant ads across all sites was $0.26 per thousand impressions (CPM), down 48 percent from the fourth quarter of 2007 and a penny down from the third quarter. Normally, there is a huge jump between the third and fourth quarters because of the holiday season, so this is not a good sign.

Pubmatic breaks down its numbers between small (less than one million pageviews a month), medium (1 million to 100 million pageviews), and large sites (more than 100 million pageviews). The effective CPMs was $0.17 for large sites, $0.30 for medium sites, and $0.61 for small sites, all flat or down a penny from the third quarter.

The chart is shown below:



To be sure, this is mainly due to the large increase in pages looking for Ads, and the slowdown in price decline is to me more interesting than the price fall itself - the implication is that websites are dropping out. Best CPM's are Business / Finance and in Technology:



Good for us that we're a Business and Technology blog then

As TechCrunch notes, 2009 is going to be a Crunch for the online Ad industry - we are not going to need 300 different ad networks sloshing around the same ads everywhere and taking 30 to 40 percent for their efforts.