New York — In a bid to attract a lot of publishers into its ad network, AOL in the coming week plans to launch a self-service tool for small Web publishers to sell and manage ads on their sites.
In the latest turn of events is the announcement yesterday that AOL’s display advertising unit is launching a new self-serve advertising option through Advertising.com. Called PubAccess, the new program offers a tool designed to make it simpler for Web site owners to make more money from their sites.
The PubAccess service would let smaller publishers to run ads from major publishers, but give them a measure of control to block specific advertisers or categories of ads, as well as the ability to monitor traffic to ads that are sold according to the size of the viewing audience, rather than the number of clicks the ads generate.
The service comes with AOL’s ad-targeting optimization tool AdLearn to help Web publishers pick the right ads for their site to gain more control over their display ads and get detailed activity reports.
“Site owners can plug into Advertising.com’s vast base of online advertisers, and will have control over which ads appear on their Web properties.”
This is AOL’s second most important project in a month intended to help it evolve from its business model as a dial-up Internet Service Provider into an advertising company competing with Google, Yahoo and other online heavyweights.
The ads themselves are sold off by Advertising.com’s normal salesforce, which keeps up dealings with advertisers far larger than most small publishers could manage. Advertising.com and AOL’s other ad services already manage the placement of 88% of online ads, according to Media Metrix.
This is somewhat a large number of publishers fight with and some will even postpone the use of display ads on their site in order to wait until they are large enough to have more autonomy when it comes to the ads they push out on their sites.
The announcement of this manual tool comes amid reports that Ad.com is in the process of slashing its sales force in half at the behest of Lynda Clarizio, who recently transitioned from president of Ad.com to run AOL’s broader ad-network group, Platform A.
PubAccess will be part of AOL’s Platform-A — a separate unit founded in 2007 to combine and leverage the ad-market power of not only Advertising.com, but also content sites such as MapQuest and TMZ, services such as AOL Instant Messenger, the behavioral-targeting technology of its Tacoda division, the AdTech ad-serving service and the contextual-targeting of Quigo, which it bought in December. AOL bought Tacoda last September.
AOL has also announced it is merging several of its most popular blogs – including Engadget, Switched, The Unofficial Apple Weblog and DownloadSquad – onto a consolidated site called the AOL Technology Network, to make the blogs a more effective selling vehicle for Platform-A’s salesforce.
Clarizio — replaces Curt Viebranz, who is said to have been unsuccessful in aligning Platform-A sooner than AOL expected — said PubAccess is tailor-made for smaller publishers.
“Smaller publishers did not have a lot of options to receive CPM pricing for their display inventory,” Clarizio said. “PubAccess provides a scalable solution.”
Embracing of the self-serve advertising model has also been gaining popularity among AOL’s rivals like Facebook and MySpace, both of which recently started to give advertisers the option to quickly buy ads on the popular social-networking sites, rather than going through the sites’ ad sales forces.
AOL also acquire the social networking site Bebo last month for $850 million to boost its slice of the social networking pie and add to its own ad-space inventory.