What Comes Next

The long tail of content presents an interesting set of problems both for publishers and advertisers. Content in the tail may be seen only a few times a day; if the publisher has a small amount on content in the tail (one blog, for example), that content is:

• Not valuable enough to the publisher to justify looking for advertisers or even signing up for a network
• Not valuable enough to advertisers or networks as inventory based on the low number of views

I think there are a number of things to talk about around advertising on the long tail, but I’m going to focus in this post on what happens when the tail wags. In other words, what happens when a chunk of content in the long, skinny part of the tail suddenly moves toward the fat part.

There are some interesting numbers in an analysis of the results of Digg and Reddit homepage hits for one long tail page. The author describes a site with less than 100 uniques per day growing to a total of 234,000 uniques over 5 days, and describes the process of adding AdSense ads to the site:

After being Dugg, our Adsense account was finally approved 36hrs later, and some adsense ads went on the front page. … Over the four days we used adsense, we made a total of 71.87 [dollars]. Our average click through rate was a dismal 0.24%, although the ads on our site seemed to be fairly highly targeted.

The first problem is the 36 hour delay in getting AdSense ads up on the site; this is a common issue with this type of content, as the ‘wag’ of the long tail content to high visibility can happen very quickly. I’m sure Google could optimize this somewhat, but the nature of long tail content is such that the publisher may not even know about the rush of traffic until days later. The only real solution is for the long tail content to somehow be enabled for advertising before the traffic comes.

The AdSense clickthrough rate of 0.24%, and thus the overall value to the publisher, is another problem: That site’s ad space was only worth a very low $0.70 on a CPM basis. This could be due to a lack of any historical data in AdSense to improve targeting, it could due to the differences in reader behavior for Digg/Reddit/etc referrals versus organic search referrals, or it could be something related to the specific content.

In all likelihood, there is an opportunity for publisher and ad network to get a lot more value from this content. Were Digg, for example, to create a new kind of ad network where signing up was just about as easy as putting a “Digg It” button on a page, they would have a good stab at signing up long tail publishers beforehand, and solving the problem that caused a 36 hour delay in monetization in the example above.

Digg, like similar sites, also has access to some great raw data about content. They know categorization, topics and tags, along with the momentum of individual content moving out of the long tail. Given an ad network, they would also be able to create multiple-impression campaigns across member sites, adding value for ad buyers. I’m betting the value of the space on each popular content page would be higher in the context of a common ad network across the Digg site and many of those linked pages. Consider the value to advertisers of being able to buy, in advance, ad space on the sites that will be on Digg’s front page in the future.

The real value may be the power of the social bookmarking sites’ community to, implicitly or explicitly, control the ads associated with each linked page. This could be as simple as doing what any smart ad network does, and showing the better performing ads more often on a given page. A more interesting approach might be to make the control explicit by giving users the ability to vote up or down the various ads associated with a page, or by showing how many previous users had clicked an ad.

I’m curious to see how directly the user generated content wave impacts advertising, and how sites like Digg evolve to increase the ad value of the long tail content that they rocket to prime time.