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From...
How the Web leveraged Clinton's confession
August 21, 1998
Web posted at: 12:40 PM EDT
by Maryann Jones Thompson
(IDG)
-- News junkies, gossip hounds and much of the taxpaying public spent
Monday and Tuesday glued to the Web for updates on Clinton's confession,
presenting unique challenges to online advertisers.
RelevantKnowledge reported 3.5 million unique users visited a group of 11 news sites on Monday and Tuesday – a jump of 43 percent over the same period last week. ABCNews.com, CNN.com and MSNBC.com all reported that Monday's traffic reached all-time highs. And Web traffic measurement firm NetRatings reported that visitors accessing the Web from home on Monday shot up 5 percent over the previous week.
"With each major news event we hope that the national advertising community begins to realize what an important part of the media mix the Internet is," says Merrill Brown, editor in chief of MSNBC on the Internet.
All this rubbernecking made the Web move like molasses. The Keynote Business 40 Index, which measures download times at 40 major business sites, reported Monday's performance at 49 percent slower than the previous Monday.
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Spokespeople for CNN.com and MSNBC.com said that access slowdowns caused both sites to move to "lite" home pages – this reduction in graphics and focus on the breaking story restores speedy page downloads. CNN also posted such a version Thursday for its report of U.S. bombings in Sudan and Afghanistan.
But moving fast enough to leverage a flood of news-driven traffic is difficult for advertisers. On TV, where Nielsen estimates 67.6 million viewers tuned in to watch Clinton's Monday evening address, advertisers who had purchased airtime during that period got those extra viewers as a bonus. On the Web, the tables are turned: sites get bonus inventory to sell because Web banner advertisers pay by the thousand ad impressions delivered.
David Zinman, cofounder and director of product management at AdKnowledge, says its Smart Banner ad management system served just 5 percent more ads on Monday compared to the same day last week. "Its likely that sites were not able to use all excess inventory generated by the news event, but were able to able leverage some of it," Zinman said.
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To get the word out quickly, AdKnowledge's online ad planning system, MarketMatch, recently launched a Special Promotions section so that sites can post notices of surplus ad inventory, and media planners with available budgets can take advantage of it.
"There's certainly nothing to prevent Web publishers from carving out a chunk of ad inventory for breaking news – it's a common practice among TV news networks," said Tim Cobb, president of RelevantKnowledge. Cobb was formerly with Turner Broadcasting.
But buying ads on news sites during a breaking story can mean top-dollar rates according to Wayne Mitchell, vice president of account services at iTraffic. He works with clients "to take advantage of ad placements already locked earlier in the year, such as community sites where people will be going to talk about [the news]."
Some advertisers shy away from associating their products with events that might be considered unpleasant. CDnow and iTraffic considered a banner campaign with creative ties to the Clinton-Lewinsky affair but scrapped the plans this afternoon after further consideration.
"Music news helps CDnow to sell products, but this isn't music related. Therefore it's not part of our brand," says Marlo Zoda, public relations manager for CDnow.