Some 117 million impressions of Web advertising will hit the auction block on Thursday in what is being touted as the first auction of Internet ads. About 90 Web sites have authorized Adbot, an auction service which launched in January, to sell blocks of ad impressions at CPM prices as low as US$5.
While some bigger sites, like SonicNet, are trying out the service to sell off unsold advertising inventory, smaller sites - which must guarantee at least 100,000 ad impressions in the next six months - have turned to Adbot as the sole marketer of their ad space.
"A site that can deliver a million impressions over the course of a year might generate $5,000 or $10,000, which isn't enough to pay a sales force - but they can get their ads sold through Adbot," said company president James Firth. Adbot is actually a spin-off of his securities auctioning business, Chicago Partnership Board.
More than 100 million banner ads have been divided into blocks according to Web site categories, like search engines and directories, arts and entertainment, and business and finance. The blocks represent anywhere from 500,000 to 5 million impressions and will go for a minimum of $5 CPM. An additional 10 million impressions of ads appearing in email will also be auctioned.
Adbot will take a 15 percent commission from the Web site publishers and charge them a 1.5 percent fee to pay for independent auditing of ads delivered. The sites participating are required to rate themselves for obscenity and strong language, according to standards established by the Recreational Software Advisory Counsel.
Advertisers or their brokers will place bids by phone during a one-hour auction on beginning at 1 p.m. CDT Thursday. The auction, which will take place in Chicago, will be broadcast via RealAudio and RealVideo on the Adbot site, and will be repeated on a monthly basis.
