I was part of a panel discussion moderated by Nick on the monetization topic at the SNAP Summit yesterday. Along with my fellow panelists, Ren, Eve, and Krishna Subramanian (formerly of Blue Lithium), we discussed that social apps which gave 1) quality attention time to ads AND 2) had desirable user segments (either demographic or behavioral) are going to monetize better than apps that don’t have both.
If you look at different webmail providers as a highly trafficked social app, the eCPM has to be pretty abysmal because of the lack of quality attention and user qualification. Car IQ, on the other hand, has the ability to do both. In doing so, they should be able to extract a higher eCPM because they can facilitate branded experiences with desired segments even without a lot of traffic.
But is eCPM even the right metric? Depends on what the M stands. If M were to stand for “minute,” then the revenue model could be a derivation of the broadcast model instead of the print model, in which case I’d say eCPM is absolutely the right metric. We’d be in a world where whereby advertisers pay for engaged attention from qualified individual as they participate in (related) activities.I believe that’s where social apps will find the rainbow’s end.
Filed under: conferences, ecpm, social apps , snap 2.0
