In the US Alexa has almost gone away, but in China there is now a whole
cottage industry set up to see how to game Alexa to make advertising
rates go up.

Thomas,

Thanks for making this post. A couple more points to make on Cost Per Day (CPD). CPD is also accepted by website owners as it provides a more predictable revenue. Further, the 4A Agencies in China whom sell 80% or so of the Branded advertising tends to have personal that have come over from traditional advertising models (out door etc) and the CPD model has a lot of logical connections and familiarity.
Cheers
Matt

Alexa in Germany is not so well known,
How important do you think the Alexa rank really?
Greetings from Germany
Bernhard

The CPC market in China is growing dispite the perception (real and percieved) of click fraud. I see the influx of advertising driving the CPC market at least for the next 12-18 months. I also am seeing a new move towards CPA (sales and leads) becoming more accepted within the vertical publisher community in China. Something that would have been unheard of even a year ago. Look at www.sinoads.com.cn to see SinoTech Media's new CPA network to address this new trend.

Dr Mathew McDougall
SinoTech Media

Russia is more like China, or at least its leading search engine, Yandex is. I always thought it was because there is a perception of so much fraud/trickery in those two countries that few would pay per click.

Thomas,

Great blog. I guess I could add some further comment from my presentation at ad:tech, Beijing. I made a couple of points on the panel was that referred to ad serving technology and also the nature of maturity of the online ad market.
Firstly, ad serving in China is not new with Double Click and Allyes having been doing this for a long time. Now, SinoTech Media has entered the market with a Chinese ad server called SinoXpress. The point I was making on the panel was that the ad servers being used today tend to be used in websites with at least one sales person and where the website wants to sell banners or display inventory. Sites that are smaller tend to manually manage the display inventory or outsource the ad units to search networks like Google, Baidu etc.

For the sites that have a sales team and sell display advertising tend to use a rate card that sells ads by CPD (cost per day). These rates tend to be justified by the sites level of traffic (validated by Alexia) or UIP. On the panel, I mentioned in my experience that alexia was hardly the right measure as there was a major push for false traffic (to artificially raise the alexa ranking) and that audience was a better gauge for setting value as opposed to reach (page views).

Dr Mathew McDougall
SinoTech Media

Andew,

You can also take a look at Mooter Media (www.mootermedia.com) or SioTech Media (www.sinotechmedia.com.cn)... they also both operate performance based ad networks...

Hi Andrew!

The ads I am referring to are banner ads on major websites.

Be very interested to hear how your search for a Chinese Internet ad network goes.

One company I met at AdTech that may be of interest is to you is Pixel Media, which runs an ad network.

Hi,

Great blog Thomas. I have a question for you and your users. I have a number of very popular Chinese websites which I run for myself and for various clients but all attempts at advertising monetization have failed. Running CPC ads from Google and Baidu pay next to nothing. Based on my experience with the US market, the sites in question should be earning perhaps 200-500 dollars per day but, in China, I see 2-5 dollars. So, what ad programs are you refering to that pay by the day? If that is where the advertisers are, that's where I want to be.

Thanks,

Andrew

Mistyped my blog address. This is the right one http://longmarch.typepad.com. My bad

I agree with Tangos. The key reason is a lack in sophistication on the side of advertisers. If you analyze your web marketing data effectively, it really does not matter what you buy on, since you are optimizing for CPC (or better Cost per successful landing) anyway.
You get what you measure and as long as advertisers measure CPM as their key metric, Impression (and Alexa rank) will stay important. I am still scared when I hear people using Alexa rank to set prices. I have found their data highly inaccurate for China, even for large web destinations.

I don't think technology would be a problem. The main reason is the boss don't really understand online marketing, so they tend to evaluate the effect by traffic rather than click.

I also saw Dr Matthew McDougall's presenation today and thought it was interesting point about the Alexa ranking being used to set advertising rates... He also mentioned the recent move toward websites and advertisers wanting using search marketing... this is something we are also considering. He presented very well and gave some good facts woth considering.