How much are your blog readers worth to an advertiser?

This weekend I spent time looking at Adify.com. a technology platform provider that helps advertisers, content aggregators and individual publishers build and commercialize premium vertical ad networks.

According to their website, Adify's platform powers more than 160 of the world's best vertical ad networks and connects premium brand advertisers to the thousands (perhaps millions) of long-tail sites with niche content. Adify was acquired by Cox in 2008 for $300 million.

While combing through their site, I came across this interesting chart that shows the average CPM throughout 2009, by genre of audience. CPM, or Cost Per Thousand, is the cost an advertiser pays for a thousand impressions of an ad to a particular audience. For example, in Q4 of 2009, advertisers paid an average of $7.48 for 1,000 displays of an ad to a Sports audience. Advertisers wanting to reach a Food audience paid $2.89. Huge difference.


Looking at the CPM trend over 2009 tells an interesting story about brands and the trending worth of online consumer audiences. At the beginning of the year, Healthy Living and Lifestyle was the most valuable, with a CPM of $8.76. By the end of year, Travel was the hottest, at $8.95. Overall, all categories were down by the end of the year. Sometimes in a recession, it won't matter what CPM you pay if consumers simply can't afford to spend (just look at the CPM trend for real estate).

I was happy to see that Moms and Parents, while falling towards the end of the year, consistently remained near the top. I'm curious to see if the numbers have changed in Q1 of this year, especially given a growing climate of economic optimism among consumers, of which Moms and Parents tend to be the most powerful.

Adify's mission is to help advertisers, agencies, and publishers make better sense of an ever-increasingly fragmented web audience. I'm especially interested in how they accomplish this because a driving force behind the fragmentation of audiences and site content is the growth of blogs. Blogs make it very easy for individuals to publish content that attracts niche readers. If Adify can help brands connect with blogs and blog readers (who are often very passionate about their interests), they will do well.