Email
RSS
Twitter
Facebook
What CPM is your app making? Data from Facebook Developers
April 27th, 2008
As Facebook application developers experiment with different ad networks for the Facebook Platform (like Social Media, Lookery, Buddy Media, Cubics, fbExchange, RockYou, Offerpal Media, Google AdSense, Zohark, AdChap, AdBlade, VideoEgg, and more), everyone’s asking the same question:
What is everybody else making, and how can I make more?
Every ad network is different (and so is every app). Some can fill different types of creative, and others can fill different user segments. For example, VideoEgg has a unique high performing unit, but can only fill a small amount of inventory, while Lookery has an open offer promising guaranteed rates for all European traffic.
While different ad networks make different claims regarding what kind of price and performance they’ll be able to deliver, the best solution for all developers is to give several of them a try and stick with the ones that work best for you. More sophisticated publishers have a person whose sole job is to turn the knobs up and down on different ad networks, depending on how they’re performing - while you may not be able to optimize your inventory down to the zip code and hour, you should be able to easily improve your eCPMs by experimenting with different ad networks.
As a start, here’s info from current Facebook app developers on what they’re making on a CPM/eCPM basis from ad networks serving the Facebook Platform:
- tspree15 is making $0.60 CPM with Social Media
- cbovis is making $1.50 CPM with VideoEgg, but they can’t cover all his inventory (the rest runs on RockYou)
- sweetsteve is making $0.27 CPM with Cubics, down from $0.43 earlier this month
- ejono is seeing a $0.40 CPM with Cubics
- cory is making a $4.78 eCPM with Social Media (???)
- mzeitler is making a $0.50 CPM each with AdSense, FB Exchange, Social Media, and RockYou (and by combining 2 units on a page is making $1.00 CPM)
- saintseiya is making $0.125 CPM with Lookery ($0.25 with 2 ads above the fold)
- markdoub is seeing $0.10 CPM with Cubics, down from $0.43
- ersingencturk is seeing $0.04 CPM with AdSense
Want to help your fellow developers out? Share your tips and lessons learned below.
What CPMs are you seeing?
|
Download The Guide to Marketing Your Brand, Company, Product, or Service Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook analyzes 12 major Facebook marketing efforts from leading brands. Who comes out on top?
Italian / Italiano
Strategic Facebook Platform Ecosystem Overview and Guide For Agencies & Brands
Track Facebook's International Growth in 95 Global Markets with our Monthly Reports
April 27th, 2008 at 1:59 am
Hi,
I’m making $3.46 eCPM with Social Media.
Thanks for this post, it’s helpful ;).
April 27th, 2008 at 9:14 am
Thanks for the mention of Lookery. Yes, our EU program of the 25 cent CPM guarantee is open. Our Global Guarantee of 12.5 cents CPM was so popular, that we can’t offer this currently.
EU however is wide open still.
Rex
Publisher Relations, Lookery
April 27th, 2008 at 10:22 am
[...] it’s rather fitting that Justin Smith of Inside Facebook took some time recently to solicit numbers from various application developers to get a sense of [...]
April 27th, 2008 at 11:58 am
Why not include Watercooler’s CPM from Federated Media into the poll?
April 27th, 2008 at 1:38 pm
at some point these networks will need to consolidate - there’s simply too much choice out there for developers to effectively make the right decision. plus, most of the benefits of ad networks come from scale (both inventory and willing advertisers)
April 27th, 2008 at 2:37 pm
[...] Justin Smith lists (at InsideFacebook) CPMs and eCPMs that Facebook app developers are collecting through ad-sales partners such as [...]
April 27th, 2008 at 3:03 pm
Social Network App CPMs Start To Emerge…
Inside Facebook has done a great job of collecting CPM/eCPM stats from a numer of app developers. Granted, this only relates to Facebook - it would be useful to get a wider view taking into account ad rates on other networks as well.
While this data o…
April 27th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
Justin,
Great post and effort on providing transparency into what kinds of eCPMs Facebook developers can expect for their applications. There’s a lot of value in having this data:
1) developers can validate their business plans / revenue models
2) potential investors can better evaluate investment opportunities
3) application designers can determine whether it’s worth it or not to build a particular application or feature
plus many more
At PubMatic, we recently opened up data across 3000+ publishers (on Facebook and off Facebook) via the PubMatic AdPrice Index (http://www.adpriceindex.com). We launched it in April for Q1 data and plan to publish monthly going forward. The key thing we’re tracking is month over month trends in monetization, so people have some visibility.
In April we found that:
- Small sites tend to monetize much better (3X) than large sites. This is a tough one for facebook developers because even though their application may be “small”, they’re part of the much larger facebook monetization ecosystem
- At the start of this year, social networking environments monetized quite poorly with respect to other verticals at 22 cents eCPM in January
- Monetization has trended up significantly over the first quarter though, rising to 37 cents on average in March 2008
Just about all data inherently has bias, so I won’t pretend that our figures are perfect. But I do think they might provide an interesting benchmark for your readers.
Regards,
Rajeev Goel
Co-founder, PubMatic
April 27th, 2008 at 4:43 pm
I am using http://www.adparlor.com. I am surprised you never mentioned them in your list - well i guess you are just talking about facebook app developers. I am using them for my myspace app (I believe they only support myspace right now but will be moving in to facebook soon). I am seeing a CPM rate of $2.10! Unbelievable.
April 27th, 2008 at 5:28 pm
[...] facebook has an interesting look at the cpm different developers are getting on their facebook [...]
April 27th, 2008 at 6:55 pm
[...] This post is in response to Inside Facebook’s post entitled, What CPM is your app making? [...]
April 27th, 2008 at 8:24 pm
This post is in response to ‘What CPM is your app making?’ I list some factors on what Ad Networks should take into consideration.
April 27th, 2008 at 9:32 pm
[...] post is in response to Inside Facebook’s post entitled, What CPM is your app making? As someone who is in charge of quite a bit of digital advertising budget from 12 brands ranging [...]
April 27th, 2008 at 10:20 pm
[...] de Inside Facebook hizo una pregunta bastante directa: ¿Que eCPM logran los que crean aplicaciones para Facebook y le [...]
April 27th, 2008 at 10:36 pm
Thanks for sharing, but wow, that’s a lot of crap CPM! I hope we all can do better down the road!
April 28th, 2008 at 1:50 am
$0.2 CPM - boy, this is turning out into a free for all…if you are gonna make 20 cents for every 1000 page views, what sort of value do page views have? And I see someone mentioning $0.04 CPM. You will be much better off using your time to guide tourists around your city.
I think the only way for folks to make serious money from ads is to either write in-depth, focussed content or develop innovative and useful apps. Hoping to survive on Facebook and MySpace ads with these ridiculous CPM is not going to get anyone anywhere
NS @ Geexoo - The Geek Feeds Hub
April 28th, 2008 at 4:32 am
[...] einem unabhängigen Blog mit Fokus auf Facebook und die Facebook Plattform, wurden ein paar interessante Zahlen zu den TKPs von Facebook Applikationen veröffentlicht. Dabei werden auch die Netzwerke genannt, über die jeweils monetarisiert [...]
April 28th, 2008 at 8:55 am
Very interesting data. The CPM rates will have to increase for any of the developers wanting to make any serious money.
April 28th, 2008 at 10:34 am
I was making $0.45 from Zohark ads.
April 28th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
[...] on my own project to more accurately monitor run rates on Facebook ad networks, for now, the sample provided by Justin Smith is sufficient enough to come to the following conclusion: why buy branded Facebook ads when you can [...]
April 28th, 2008 at 2:18 pm
Hey Justin;
Despite your claims (“While different ad networks make different claims regarding what kind of price and performance they’ll be able to deliver..) basically none of the ad networks make claims to performance other than “Try us for a few days and see how you do”.
Also, measuring by eCPMs is highly unreliable, b/c of the fundamental truth: Views and Clicks are not created equal.
Some apps will show 200 ads each day to each user; some apps will 20 ads each day to the same user. So who’s ads are worth more? That’s a factor of 10.
What if app A shows 10k ads to 1k users in Tureky and app B shows 10k ads to 1k users in the UK? The difference in the value of each click here is a factor of more than 10.
It’s nice to have some numbers, but it’s really too early to call this, as John says: … a lot of crap CPM!…. Between issues of location and the high variability of both volume and quality of that volume, it’s really hard to make any good comparisons at this point. We simply can’t compare Facebook traffic with Blog traffic or news traffic or magazine traffic. It’s a different beast.
I too hope that we can increase payouts, but we also have to manage our expectations. Most Facebook apps are not simply not delivering a traffic quality that would justify $4 CPMs.
I like your comment: …the best solution for all developers is to give several of them a try and stick with the ones that work best for you.
Gates
Cubics Publisher Relations Manager
April 28th, 2008 at 7:49 pm
[...] it’s rather fitting that Justin Smith of Inside Facebook took some time recently to solicit numbers from various application developers to get a sense of [...]
April 29th, 2008 at 12:41 am
[...] קסם מתחילים לשמוע את המטבעות נופלים. אז זהו שלא, הבלוג Inside Facebook פירסם היום את ה-CPM (העלות עבור אלף צפיות במודעת פירסום) [...]
April 30th, 2008 at 4:57 pm
[...] a nice contrast to my previous post about LinkedIn CPM rates, check out this data on Facebook CPM rates which more or less triangulates to other datapoints that suggest social ads just haven’t had [...]
May 2nd, 2008 at 11:57 am
[...] to the blog, the posting is meant to be a starting place to determine what various developers are making on a [...]
June 6th, 2008 at 2:33 pm
[...] Inside Facebook » What CPM is your app making? Data from Facebook Developers “As Facebook application developers experiment with different ad networks for the Facebook Platform (like Social Media, Lookery, Buddy Media, Cubics, fbExchange, RockYou, Offerpal Media, Google AdSense, Zohark, AdChap, AdBlade, VideoEgg, and more), everyo (tags: social advertising) [...]
July 23rd, 2008 at 1:14 am
[...] Click here to find more data on what CPMs developers are making on Facebook. [...]
August 10th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
I’m still unsure which Ad network to go with, for my App, I am wanting to try using Google first, since I am already using them for my main site (http://www.infinitepixelstudios.com/home.html)
… and get around 0.5 eCPM
They sure don’t make it easy to put the ads into Facebook Apps do they?
November 12th, 2008 at 2:27 pm
[...] is more specific. Applications on these sites are having an even tougher time. On one blog, app developers reported ad CPMs (cost per thousand views) far below a dollar. It’s clear that a new, more effective [...]
February 18th, 2009 at 2:26 am
[...] szponzorált linkek helyezhetők el.) Facebook alkalmazásokban történő hirdetésekkel több ad network is foglalkozik, például a Social Media, Offerpal Media, Super Rewards, AdParlor, Buddy Media, [...]
February 19th, 2009 at 6:08 am
[...] some direct and integrated deals can go for anywhere from $5 to $20 CPMs, most developers have been reporting between $0.10 to $0.50 CPMs on most Facebook Platform remnant inventory (with European prices being generally slightly higher). And several developers have reported very [...]