TodSacerdoti.com

My CTO mentioned the site AuctionAds to me today and I recalled that I hadn’t checked up on their progress. Boy was I surprised reading Shoemoney’s latest post on the topic:

(AuctionAds was) started in March and has grown to 25,000 publishers showing 300 million impressions a day on over 80,000 unique domains is the hottest new advertising product for 2007.

I think those numbers are impressive no matter what business you are in, but I find them particularly interesting given their traction relative to AdBrite. AdBrite claims around 650M daily impressions across 31,000 sites, which would mean that AuctionAds has nearly caught them in under six months.

Now, there are lots of reasons to questions these numbers and I have seen their ads in lots of questionable locations (such as ThePirateBay). However, I believe the most interesting question to ask is “Why have they grown so fast?”

My hypotheses for the early success of AuctionAds:

1. They are compatible with Google Adsense (ie, you can run both)
2. There are many sites that Adsense will not monetize (works for AdBrite too)
3. The company was started by a famous money maker (ie, powerful distribution)
4. The ads are actually relevant content to the site, so folks will run them even if the economics are not super

That all said, the rubber meets the road on economics. I have yet to find any bloggers at scale that are generating over a $.20 CPM, which is still small potatoes in most categories. This will be an interesting one to watch but I am an early believer for sure.