Summary
Branded sites are blaming the myriad of networks for undercutting the medium and ability to produce content. The solution doesn't just lie in digital marketers understanding the value of content providers, it also lies in the branded sites ability to provide better analytics.
Analysis
There's a digital divide going on alright and it's all about analytics. Worry for the legacy publishers who have fallen behind in being able to explain to their clients how their campaigns performed because they assume their clients and agencies get all the data they need from 3rd party reporting tools like Dart, Atlas or Omniture.
On one side of the divide is a select few publishers who are using Google Analytics and internal databases. They tell media teams what the bounce rate is for sponsored content, the titles, industries and company sizes of the users who engage with that messaging, how a client developing content is trending in natural search and unique vs repeat users. These are the outliers. My team rarely has a discussions about CPM with the outliers.
On the other side is everybody else. Everybody else supplies impressions and clicks. Whatever analytics they supply is typically from research conducted before the campaign begins. Once the campaign begins it's a faith based initiative. It's almost the same data if you use a network or a branded site. Once the campaign is rolling it's tough to disseminate why the branded site is 30% more valuable than the network. In fact, the network may have the advantage because they optimize on content or behavoir. Mainly it's a data vacuum.
So if you're a media planner and you lack the decisive data you need to make decisions based on prior efforts, you push the publishers to make cuts on CPM's because you can in 2009. If you're a publisher and you want to reclaim that higher CPM, your sentences need to begin with, "This is who is engaging with your messaging in our content and this is how they're engaging." If the publisher has no idea, they need to find ways to get more involved. They need to close the digital divide.
Knowing what you're buying is worth a significantly higher CPM.
