CMF Network Ads

CMF Advertising has announced Network Ads for only $10. This option allows advertisers to place an ad across the network of over 600 publishers.

This option became available just four days ago. So far, I have received notices of 10 blogs purchasing these ads. As a publisher, I have the choice to accept or deny the ads. As a publisher, I will receive a very small compensation. This is figured by a formula based on the percent of the total pageviews the advertiser received from your blog.

For example, If over the month that the ad runs it is shown 500,000 total times, and 5000 of those came from your blog then you will receive 5000/500000 (which is 1%) of $9. CMF will take $1 from the $10 as their fee and distribute $9 among the publishers. So, in this example, you would receive 1% of $9, which is $.09.

How does this example compare with reality. Take this blog as an example. In the past month, this blog, according to Google Analytics, received 8943 pageviews. Let's assume that the 11 ads all ran for this month (of course since the buying times don't occur all at once, there will be a different actual total for each). That would mean that each received 8943/11 = 813 pageviews. Let's assume that 600 of the 640 publishers in the CMF system accepted the ad. And let's assume that on average they each receive the same amount of traffic as this blog (a wild guess... but at Alexa rank of about 300,000, this is a sort of average blog). That would mean a total of 8943 x 600 = 5,365,800 pageviews. So my percent of the $9.00 that will be split is going to be 813/5365800 = 0.00152 x 9 = 0.0014. This is just over one tenth of one cent.

What affect will this have on ads placed individually through campaigns? Well, already I have gone from having 2 ads on this blog to having 12. So the two people who paid my requested price are now sharing their time with 10 other advertisers. My requested price for this blog is only $.10 a month, a very reasonable rate, but some blogs charge as much as a dollar, and many charge $.25. Will those publishers accept a flood of ads that will get equal time on their blogs as people who specifically paid quite a bit more to have their ads shown on a particular blog?

I think we have yet to see if there will soon be banners stating "No network ads," similar to the way that we saw "No paid ads" on Entrecard blogs. I have occasionally had as many as 10 regular price ads rotating through two CMF slots in a month, but if the number of network ads increases significantly, I may choose to decline all that would raise the number of advertisers on a particular blog past some limit.

For publishers who receive very few ads this may be a good thing. For publishers who already have a healthy number of requests to run ads, at prices significantly more than what they end up receiving for network ads, it may not be so great. It will probably take a month of actual figures to determine this.

CMF Ads