Escalate Media

Mom Bloggers May Get the Brunt of the Slumping Online Ad Market

As 2009 starts to unfold, I’m already seeing some of my 2009 women’s trend predictions take place. This morning it was announced that the Glam Media ad network acquired AdaptiveAds, a Mumbai, India based banner and text ad network.

While I don’t have intimate knowledge of either company’s inner workings, I got to thinking about this move – its both smart and confusing:

Smart because:

• Glam knows that it is a buyer’s market right now, and they can take advantage of that fact while the economy is wobbly.
• AdaptiveAds has some useful ad-serving technology that comes with the transaction, including a self-serve purchase system for ad agencies (which media buyers love).
• It is likely that AdaptiveAds has penetration in different markets overseas that Glam wants to penetrate. A very smart move to diversify their revenue base.

But even though I predicted this would start happening, I’m surprised that it’s Glam, and I’m surprised that it’s now:

• This is the worst time of year for online media, and the rest of 2009 is a complete crap shoot at this point.
• Glam already has inventory issues – adding more publishers to their roster may compound the problem even more.
• Glam already has stability issues. In the last 3 months they slowed down publisher payments from 90 to 120 days, and slashed exec compensation by 60%.

So What Does All of This Have to do With Mommy Bloggers?

Right now, the online ad industry has a ratio problem – not enough ad inventory vs. too much publisher inventory. Glam, being one of the leaders in the women’s ad space, is doing everything they can to compensate for the fact that they don’t have enough ad inventory. They’ve cut costs in their operations, and are taking longer to pay their accounts payables.

But only thing they can do to compensate on the publisher inventory side of things is cut under-performing publishers from their programs. It’s much easier and cost effective to cut hundreds of mommy blogs from the network than it is to cut one high-performing site. Escalate Media’s DiaperSwappers mom community can deliver the same amount of impressions as 336 mom blogs, and that’s if they have a generously estimated 25K page views a month. Most mom blogs have far less than that.

Glam isn’t the only network working with mom bloggers. I suspect this fear is a non-issue with the BlogHerAds network, as mom blogs are their bread and butter. But BlogHer also has some pretty strict content restrictions that are getting harder for publishers to accept as brands start reaching out to bloggers directly. And who knows what’s going on elsewhere in the already-too-saturated mom’s ad network space.

I truly believe that the online advertising market, while seeing a slump right now, will be the first to recover from the economic mess we are in. And I also believe that ads targeting moms is a realtively-speaking strong market that is here to stay. More advertising budgets are moving online every day, and outdoor, newspaper and TV are getting hit hard.

But it’s anyone’s guess as to when a true advertising recovery is going to happen, and I worry about what the casualties will be in the mom blogging community until then.

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