The Citigroup (C) analyst spoke with PubMatic and the Rubicon Project, two “optimization” firms that help publishers manage inventory they hand over to ad networks. And both say they’re seeing continued upticks in sales and demand.

Pubmatic, for instance, says pricing has increased every month this year, and Rubicon says that they’re seeing demand from–believe it or not–travel and auto advertisers. Just as encouraging, buyers are actually making “longer-term” plans, which was unheard of in the darkest days of 2008 and 2009.

Both firms also reiterate the conventional wisdom that we’ve been hearing for the past 12 months: The money that is being spent is increasingly going to “performance-based” ads, which are paid for only when someone interacts with them. That’s another data point in favor of Google (GOOG), whose core product is performance-based.

Again: Things were so lousy a year ago and through the spring of 2009 that it’s prudent to take these kinds of data in stride.

And if you really want to be half-empty about it, you can note that the inventory Rubicon and Pubmatic sell is the cheapest real estate publishers have to offer. Which means it’s hard to say how various sites’ high-end real estate–the stuff they sell themselves–is doing.

We’ll get a better sense of that in about a month or so, during Q3 earnings season, when we get color from Web publishers like Time Warner’s (TWX) AOL and the New York Times (NYT).

But, as I said, this is supposed to be an optimistic post.

The paper says “some readers” have seen unauthorized pop-up ads promoting antivirus software on NYTimes.com, and warns visitors who see the ad not to click on it but to restart their browsers instead. While the Times doesn’t spell this out, the newspaper has likely had its site hijacked by a “malware” scammer who is trying to trick visitors into installing pernicious software onto their hard drives.

MediaMemo reader Tim Minter passed along an image of the pop-up below (click to enlarge). Here’s his description of the way it appeared on his desktop:

The ad hijack[ed] my computer. Say I’m reading an article (the Clean Water Act was the one that caught me). It then redirects my browser involuntarily to sex-and-the-city.cn. That site then redirects to the ad I screen-captured.

At no time did I click anything. That’s what is so nefarious about this malware.

Thankfully, since I run OS X, I knew immediately it was malware (seeing WindowsXP on a Mac where that’s not installed is suspicious).

You generally have to travel farther down the Internet publishing food chain to find this kind of bogus ad–go hunting for porn and/or illegal downloads, for instance, and you’ll find plenty of this stuff.

But Web advertising is still a wild and woolly place, and this type of thing still plagues high-end publishers too. Sometimes it’s the fault of ad networks the publishers use to move their unsold inventory; sometimes the bogus ads are bought directly from the publishers themselves.

I’ve asked both the Times PR staff and ad tech team for additional information about the ads, but haven’t heard back yet. Still, you have to give the paper credit for flagging this on its front page at all.

UPDATE: The Times’ explanation: A hacker duped the paper by buying the ad directly from the paper’s sales staff, then disguising it as a legit ad for a week.

But one observer says it’s already here: Ad optimization firm PubMatic reports that prices for ad network inventory it sees have increased 35 percent since the beginning of the year.

The firm’s data make for a hopeful chart (click to enlarge):

But these numbers could be less meaningful than they look. The most important thing to keep in mind here is that Pubmatic is only tracking prices for ad-network inventory. And if low-priced ad networks are taking market share from display ads, as is likely the case, then these numbers won’t do much good for  publishers–perhaps like the very one producing this site–who specialize in big, premium ad buys.

And the other obvious point to make here is that Pubmatic’s data are only about pricing, not volume, so they don’t really tell us whether advertisers are spending more, or less, than they used to.

But for what it’s worth, I made my own informal channel-check with two big publishers who do specialize in branded ads yesterday, and they told me things had picked up recently, as well: They differed on the degree of enthusiasm for the remainder of the year, but both cited demand from entertainment advertisers, as well as for advertisers of consumer packaged goods.

So maybe Pubmatic’s numbers are at least directionally accurate. That’d be nice, right?

A few weeks ago I sat down with Josh Marshall, the journalist/entrepreneur behind Talking Points Memo, and had a great chat about news, new media and the business of running a self-funded Web site. But my notes and video have sat on my hard drive since then, for no other reason than I never got around to publishing them.

Thank you, Maureen Dowd, for the kick in the pants I needed: Over the weekend, the New York Times (NYT) columnist has given Marshall a huge, if unintended, endorsement by borrowing his work and then getting caught.

After an initial attempt by Dowd to explain away the similarity between her work and his, the Times is now running a correction on Dowd’s Sunday column, noting that she “failed to attribute a paragraph” to Marshall.

You’ll read plenty more about this on the Web over the next few days, if you’re inclined. But it would be a shame if that’s the only thing you know about Marshall’s site, which is an interesting hybrid of politically focused reporting, commentary, and aggregation/blogging.

And I do mean a mix: If you just glimpse quickly at his site, you might think it’s the same grouping of links and headlines that you can find anywhere else on the Web. But Marshall was a real reporter prior to starting the site and his 12-person staff does real reporting. Its best work, to date, was uncovering the Bush administration’s U.S. Attorneys scandal in 2007, which led to prestigious Polk Award in 2008.

Just as interesting: It’s a profitable business that has never taken outside investment and until recently, has made almost all of its money by relying on ad networks. The most effective ad network, says Marshall: Google’s AdSense. See! Google (GOOG) really does support content!

More recently, Marshall has hired Yahoo (YHOO) vet Diane Rinaldo to serve as the company’s first real ad rep, trying to translate the site’s one million (give or take) monthly unique readers into more significant revenue. That’s alleged to be a real challenge since advertisers are supposedly loath to touch political content. But then again, start-up blogs aren’t supposed to do real journalism–or act as unattributed contributors to the country’s most prestigious newspaper.

]]> http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090518/meet-maureen-dowds-favorite-writer-talking-points-memos-josh-marshall/feed/ 0 http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090129/the-new-york-times-says-energy-companies-are-advertising-hollywood-isnt/ http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090129/the-new-york-times-says-energy-companies-are-advertising-hollywood-isnt/#comments Thu, 29 Jan 2009 14:10:46 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=3655 As I noted yesterday, the New York Times is going to stop providing monthly updates on the state of its business, which is a bummer but also understandable. But company execs do seem willing to discuss their business in detail during the quarterly earnings calls, which is extremely helpful.

Yesterday, for instance, the New York Times (NYT) provided a wealth of information about the state of the ad business. Here’s a summary, with an assist from Seeking Alpha, of stuff I found interesting:

What kinds of companies are still buying ads? Corporate advertisers like energy companies and financial companies–those that haven’t gone bust–trying to reassure customers; advocacy groups trying to influence the new administration.

Who’s cutting back? Hollywood: Fewer movies released, and less marketing money put behind each release (though that will change during awards season this spring); telcos, because there’s less growth out there; books, for obvious reasons.

Classified ads are killing us. Above and beyond anything else, the newspaper business is dying because its super-lucrative classified ads business is (still) dying. Technology, in the form of competition like Craigslist, critically wounded classifieds, and now the economy is finishing it off. The dropoff in the help-wanted category accounted for half of the the Times’s digital decline in Q4, said digital exec Martin Nisenholtz.

NewYorkTimes.com is a meaningful brand for display advertisers. Other properties–like About.com–aren’t. Nisenholtz says ad rates at NYT.com actually increased for most of the year. But About.com, which had been the company’s star digital performer, fell apart at the end of the year because of its display ad business–there’s nothing about the site’s brand or audience that commands a premium from display advertisers. The paper is now redesigning About.com to emphasize cost-per-click ads–that would be ads from Google (GOOG), primarily–because there’s still growth there.

Perhaps as much as 50 percent of the company’s digital inventory is sold by ad networks In response to a question, Nisenholtz wouldn’t put out an exact number. But he came close: “I would say that from an industry-wide perspective, you are probably looking today at around 50 percent. Some of our properties are above that, some of them are below that, but that’s about where the industry is at this point.”

]]> http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090129/the-new-york-times-says-energy-companies-are-advertising-hollywood-isnt/feed/ 0 http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090106/one-less-ad-network-peer39-shuts-down-semantic-ad-network-concentrating-on-technology/ http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090106/one-less-ad-network-peer39-shuts-down-semantic-ad-network-concentrating-on-technology/#comments Tue, 06 Jan 2009 19:30:39 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=2812 I’ve yet to find anyone with a firm grip on the number of ad networks out there: 300? 400? Many more? But now there’s one fewer: Peer39, a New York- and Israel-based company, has turned off its “Semantic Ad Network” and laid off its four-person sales staff.

CEO Amiad Solomon says the company will focus its resources on its core semantic technology, which is supposed to let publishers, ad agencies and other clients quickly assess the content on any given Web page and post an appropriate ad. The company employs 50 people, but will expand to 60 or 70 by the end of this year, Solomon tells me.

The company has raised $11.7 million from Canaan Venture Partners, Dawntreader Ventures, and J.P. Morgan.

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