SiliconBeat

Hundreds of small publishers attended the AdSpace conference in San Francisco on Wednesday to get tips on how to increase advertising revenue.
While the future of content may be on the Internet, Web publishers are hurting as much as anyone from the current economic collapse. With the crisis, ad prices have fallen more than 50 percent, dropping from 37 cents per thousand impressions to as little as 17 cents per thousand impressions.
But the message from the conference, which was held at The Moscone Center in San Francisco, was still more “boom” than “gloom.” An expo hall that served both AdSpace and the more established Ad:Tech conference was stocked with companies offering better ways to do everything from lead generation to vendor payment. The buzz, while not as frenetic as past tech conferences, had an undertone of steely determination.
“This is the time when new breakthrough methods are built,” said Tim Cadogan, chief executive of OpenX, an open-source ad server based in Pasadena. OpenX recently launched the OpenX market, which lets publishers sell their advertising inventory in an online auction.
The market was designed to give smaller and mid-sized publishers the same opportunities that larger players have. Participants can set a minimum bid for their Web pages or use the auction to try and resell inventory at a better price. “It’s risk free and it gives you the chance to make more money,” Cadogan said.

Another option that publishers have is to optimize the way their ads look. “We can help them by formating their text ads, which means changing the look and feel of the ad so that people will click on it more and notice it,” said Paul Edmondson, chief executive of YieldBuild, a start-up based in San Francisco. YieldBuild is free to try for 30 days and then takes a cut of 3 percent of ad impressions.

A panel made up of Google employees urged the publishers to try interest-based ads, a form of advertising that is targeted to a user’s online behavior that Google launched last month. “Ultimately, this is where the super-high premium ads are coming from,” said Sean Harvey, a business product manager at Google.