hypebot: “Free” Thinker – The Orchard’s Greg Scholl:
On a cautionary note, however, we harbor increasing concerns about the long-term viability of many of the new ad supported businesses. The fact is, CPMs have been disappointing. Unless services get a lot smarter about helping advertisers hyper-target audiences using very detailed demographic information and are able to staff experience ad sales teams to engage advertisers and translate this into higher CPMs, then it is difficult to conceive of how these services will survive. Certainly, speaking on behalf of The Orchard at least, we won’t continue to license them.
Very few entities have both the density of users to hyper-target ads and the mass to deliver a significant number of impressions to a major advertiser. Only the biggest sites can do it. You’d have to be on the order of Myspace, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft.