Google Premium Audience Network - what I know

John Chow broke the story about Google’s Premium Network. It’s been picked up now by all the usual suspects, so I’ll post what I know.

They are creating premium audiences (or “clusters” as they are calling it) for specific verticals. Within the verticals are hand-selected sites they feel are best for big brands. These sites are presumably being paid under $5 CPM to show display ads or video ads. They must be above the fold.

The advertiser can select a cluster (and a DMA if they wish), and their video/display ad will be shown only on those hand-selected sites. This is Site-Targeting the way advertisers have said they want it. There will eventually be 60+ clusters, but right now only 8 are available. These include Pop culture, movies, family, music, etc. CPMs are $5-$15. This is above remnant network ads, but below what you’d typically pay to be on most of those sites they have selected.

The quality of site looks to be pretty good: LinkedIn, woot, lyrics.com, popsugar.com, buy.com. Combined with the fact you will only be getting above the fold placement and video ads, it seems to be a pretty strong play into the ad network game, and I’d bet a lot of the networks will feel this when they launch it to their full advertiser base in the coming year.

Hey Yahoo & MSN. You’re falling WAY behind. Google is focusing on their biggest asset - their advertiser network - with this one. And even more specifically, the advertisers that aren’t using them to place the big branding buys. Do you want a slice of that?

Still not available and killer advertiser app if you ask me:

Behaviorally targeted advertisements across a huge network of publishers. When will somebody do this? Yahoo and MSN have the best opportunity to try it since they have a large content network that they own. Google has a large content network that they’ve aggregated. This is going to be a big area in 2007. I’m hoping for some white papers on CPC & CPM ads working together - branding and direct response buys synergistic effect.