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Source:CenterNetworks

Virtual events provider ON24 announced this morning that they have raised over $8 million in equity and expansion capital financing, bringing their total to $46 million venture capital raised to-date. U.S. Venture Partners, Canaan Partners, and Rho Ventures led the equity round; while Gold Hill Capital led the expansion capital financing. The company notes that the funding will be used to "accelerate ON24’s global expansion of the sales, marketing and client services organizations; and product development initiatives, including ON24 Virtual Show and the company’s flagship webcasting platform."

ON24 reports sales growth of 40% year-over-year. ON24 offers a "Virtual Show" product (see screenshot below). I get the idea of virtual (i.e remote) conferences and the associated cost benefits. But does it need to look like a virtual world too? I’d prefer a simple Web page with the different rooms and events rather than this silly, goofy mall-like atmosphere. What’s the cost to build these virtual worlds? I am guessing there are some standard setups but I am sure that most exhibitors want something custom. Just because something is x in real-life, doesn’t mean that online we need to recreate x.

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Source:CenterNetworks

PubMatic is out with their monthly AdPrice Index report for June 2008 and their analysis shows that prices remain stagnant and show little movement from the previous month. Web sites with less than 1 million pageviews dropped 32 cents/cpm while medium and large sites (those over 1 million views) saw a small increase leading to the overall flat movement.

PubMatic also reported that the news category was basically cut by 50% in cpm ad rates. What I am seeing on my Web sites is that CPMs are down 20% month over month on remnant (default) networks. Here are the key metrics direct from the AdPrice Index:

• On average, Web site monetization decreased by less than one percent from $0.37 in May to $.036 in June. *(Pricing data reflects net publisher monetization via ad networks and excludes ad networks’ share of ad spends as well as inventory sold directly by publishers to ad agencies or advertisers).
• By size, small size Web sites had the largest drop to $0.81 in June, down from $1.13 in May.
• By vertical, News and Gaming had significant drops, sliding $0.62 and $0.20, respectively.
• Entertainment showed the only increase jumping $0.11 from $0.29 in May to $0.40 in June.

If the trend continues that rates for smaller publishers continues to drop significantly, will these smaller publishers be forced out of business?

As always, note that the AdPrice Index only measures data from publishers using PubMatic for ad serving.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 at 7:54 am and is filed under advertising, Quick News, Pubmatic, Social Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.