For the past year MyAds has been a low volume source of higher quality traffic that no one really talked about (understandably). Recently MyAds integrated into the Rubicon Network, a huge network comprised of more than 600 mega publishers.
The end result is MyAds can give you much larger reach, but the deeper targeting of MySpace.com is gone. You can no longer target by age and gender, instead bidding is done on “channels” (sports, business, fashion, etc).
Addicted to huge dumping traffic? You’ll get your fix with the new MyAds distribution paths. 1000 unique visitors per hour is an easy number to hit. The problem – it’s some of the worst traffic I’ve ever seen in my life. Firecyde’s campaigns saw conversion costs jump from $3.00 to $50.00.
There is opportunity is split testing channels. Lack of gender targeting and other things that added value to MyAds as a self serve network for MySpace will drive a lot of the seasoned traffic buying veterans to other ballgames. Inventory will open up. Clicks will probably bounce off the $0.05/visit area before people really start figuring out how to make this work and bid competition returns.
MyAds gives and takes away. It seems like lack of targeting might be beneficial to traffic volume to dating sites and other content that is typically restricted to single people. The downside is you can’t directly target ads by age or gender so making ads work or getting an edge is really difficult.
It’s interesting in a time when publishers are focused on building profile data for users to target relevant ads that MyAds seems to be going in the other direction all together.
