Last week while speaking at OnMedia in New York City, Anu Shukla, CEO of Offerpal Media said that the company is providing many application developers with $100 to $500 eCPMs. For those that are unaware of CPMs, it’s the measurement used to determine how much a publisher gets paid for every thousand page views. It’s the defacto standard for measuring advertising on the web.
Attracting higher CPMs is “indicative of how engaging the applications are”, said Shukla as the audience looked on skeptically. Offerpal Media is one of the leading offer-based advertising platform on the Facebook platform (they are also a sponsor of this website). Many in the industry have begun to wonder how long the party can last. With over 160 million Facebook users (based on our estimates), and the site adding around 450,000 users a day, we believe offer-based advertising has a profitable future ahead.
The skeptics argue that there’s only so many times that users will register new offers through the Offerpal system. It’s a fair argument. Can users really continue to sign up for Netflix, Blockbuster, and other affiliate programs offered through these systems? There are a number of competing offer-based platforms in the space, including SuperRewards and Social Cash (both are also sponsors of this site), that believe this will continue to be a profitable business.
It has to be one of the most aggressive advertising spaces. There are companies in Europe and elsewhere that have been pushing the limits in terms of tricking users to click and download software which has extremely high payouts. While none of the companies are necessarily involved in such activities, the space is well known for pushing the limits to get new user registrations.
Engaging applications continue to profit heavily from these offer-based ad networks and the networks profit from clever developers. If you are looking to live off of your Facebook applications, it looks like the offer-based route is the best way to go. What experiences have you had with Offerpal, SuperRewards, Social Cash, and other ad networks?
eCPM is a deceptive term to use for these offer pages. ALL of the offer providers base the "eCPM" off of daily unique users that see the offer page. NOT off of the number of impressions which is the standard for banners.
While I think what these offer companies are doing is great and they do provide good returns, I think we need a better way of measuring them, or at least a different term than "eCPM". This is apples to oranges, not apples to apples.
Comment by Chad Boyda — February 9, 2009 @ 3:32 pm
I can only confirm this. To the previous commenter: not only the eCPM is good, I just launched my application 2 weeks ago and the earnings per 1000 users through Offerpal Media are currently at $226. The question is of course: how long will it last.
Comment by Jan DV — February 10, 2009 @ 3:44 am
My average eCPM is: $188.71
Comment by Ray Ray Angel — February 15, 2009 @ 1:07 am