How Does AJAX Web Design Effect Ad Revenue

Mike Davidson of Mikeindustries.com and Netvibes.com recently published a thorough analysis of how MySpace could cut their page views by at least 2/3rds by optimizing their page serving using AJAX. This would make MySpace significantly more efficient for users, but also reduce the site's ad impressions by 2/3rds. Davidson explains that this isn't necessarily a bad thing since MySpace apparently is having a hard time selling out their billions of page views a month anyway.

Davidson created the following theoretical graph to show the significance of the changes he suggests:

Davidson explains that MySpace could benefit form more efficiencies on routine tasks, such as logging in, reading emails, and viewing photos would take significantly less page views to accomplish. Additionally, AJAX would allow elements within a page to be updated without updating the entire page, saving bandwidth and load times.

A few thoughts on this:

1. How can a site sell out their ad inventory when there are so many ad programs capable of delivering relevant run-of-site advertising including Google AdSense? I imagine it would be difficult to sell tens of billions of ad impressions directly, but there is no limit on the number of ads AdSense can serve.

2. Speaking of AdSense, it looks like MySpace should consider using channels to increase the relevancy of their ads. For example, the ads showing on my MySpace profile right now - which contains a fair amount of content about me - are related to pre-schools and full-figured dating services. If Google AdSense was triggering ads of the content I've created rather than other copy on the page, the ads would likely be much more relevant and generate higher priced clicks.

3. How many ad platforms are AJAX compliant and capable of serving relevant ads based on page changes generated by AJAX calls? Sites moving to AJAX interfaces may be limiting their revenue potential if they get too far of advertising platforms. How far ahead of the curve can a company go before they limit their revenue potential?

4. While I'm not exactly complaining about the bikini-clad models who pitching dating services to me every time I use MySpace, they're not exactly relevant for a married guy like myself. Surprisingly, I was greeted with ads for digital cable and home refinancing today which are many times more relevant than the typical MySpace ad. How many fold could MySpace increase their CPM rates by taking more demographic information into consideration?

Lance, I don't think I've experienced what you've described. As I understand your post, a person hitting refresh on a single page of this site would eventually see public service ads rather than ads relevant to the page's content. Correct? If so, I haven't been able to recreate it.

If it's based on page after page of search results, that's a different situation since each page is, in fact, different. The criteria used to serve ads next to search results is different from those used for content targeted advertising.

BTW, using alternative ad programs when AdSense can't find a relevant ad is worth investigating. It's a fairly simple thing to do and helps prevent PSAs from showing.

I’m working on a new analytics platform explicitly designed for Ajax applications - http://www.ajaxmetrics.com - and I’d love to hear what you have to say about it.

Comments

1. Posted by: Lance on May 8, 2006 10:28 AM:

To point #1: Adsence et al do run out of ads quite quickly and quite often in fact.

After a low paying page has been visited by the same visitor a number of times they will see less ads until you see PSAs which pay no money at all. You can see this in action by going one by one down the SERPs for a single term. You won't see the PSA but you will see fewer ads after the forth or fifth page.

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