It’s a very bold statement but the NY Times doesn’t need to charge for their content. They just need to hire really intelligent marketers and data analysts who understand arbitrage.
If you are reading this and you haven’t played around with segmentation re-targeting on display you are missing out, it is by far one of the coolest features recently launched by most of the re-targeting DPS’s. I just starting playing around with AdRoll who is also plugged into FBX Exchange.
The more I play around with re-targeting, the more my mind just comes up with crazy ideas for monetization.
When I say segmentation re-targeting, I mean re-targeting specific ads to specific segments of users who bounce off specific pages of your web site. An example of this is if I go to Pro Football Talk one of my favorite web sites to visit and I finish reading an article, they could re-target an ad with a similar article to me on Facebook or some other content site that I am on all through re-targeting.
If the NY Times as an example can use predictive analysis to predict the “Yield” or gross ad revenue from a specific article with some certainty then the arbitrage fun can begin.
Re-targeting campaigns can then be leveraged to bring users users back who just have just read a similar article. The equation would be a user read this article; they are most likely to be interested in these other 3 articles as well and these three articles offer an average yield of “x”.
Once you understand average yield on the articles your marketing and understand which segment to target then you could start building your re-targeting ads around those articles. You know that you have to hit under “X” “CPC” to be profitable and your profit is calculated by Average Page Yield- Minus Average CPC from platform.
On a personal level,serving ads based around compelling content that people are already proven to be interested in, offers both value to the publisher, user, and advertiser. I am always sure CTR would be very high.
How many content ads have you seen recently on Facebook? Very few.
