When Competitors Join Forces to Enhance Advertising Revenue

Giorgio Riva, the Managing Director of RCS Digital, and Claudio Giua, the Editorial Director of Espresso Group (Italy) spoke today at the INMA Outlook 2010 conference in Liverpool. They created the Premium Publisher Network which represents an opportunity for Italian publishers to face the new competitive scenario within the online advertising market, offering a unique media solution to reach qualified targets and lead the performance market. Advertisers can plan advertising campaigns on specific channels (split by topic, target, and geo-localised), selecting the most relevant keywords to reach their audience objectives.
The growth in the Italian online advertising market is 39% year over year. Italian ad performance is driven by Google. Google estimated market share is 80% – where keyword search is 90% and content match 10%.

Two publishers, RCS and L’Espresso decided to join theit forces and create a Premium Publisher Network, a consortium for all Italian publishers to join and to enhance the advertising revenue. In the publishing arena RCS and L’Espresso are strong competitors, as online publishers they want to enhance their identity and the values of their branded content.

Premium Publisher Networks offers advertising text links. This is the same type of advertisements RCS offered through Google Ad Works and L’espresso via Yahoo Content Match.

What PPN offers about its ads is:

• performance text links,
• transparency,
• control,
• premium price,
• quality.

Sales and technological platforms are managed by an independent 3rd party sales partner. Advertisers cannot choose one site or another for the advertisments, but the entire network of sites.

The offer for publisher is: the control over performance, additional revenues, and full knowledge of audiences behavior. On the other side, the advertisers get high quality audience and no blink network.

There are more than 50 editorial websites in the network already, and over 600 million page views monthly. The goal is to reach 1 billion page views in the upcoming months. They are covering national news, local news, magazines and radios.

The key numbers for the Italian market are:

• 22 million internet population,
• Premium Publisher Network has 55% of all italian users
• Premium Publisher Network CPC (cost per click) equals 0.33 euro (which is double of the average value of the italian market)
• 70% advertisers renewed the campaign

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