Back to Basics: Why Marketers Are Taking a Second Look At Forums

Social networking. The Superbowl. New Media. What do all these words conjur up?  For many of us in the marketing world the first thing we think of when we hear these words is ad revenue.

Despite the recession, 2009 was a remarkable year for online advertising. Pubmatic's 2009 Year End Ad Price Index indicates that 2009 proved to be a rebound year where ad pricing increased significantly and steadily, but the fourth quarter was off the charts. The study shows that the average CPM of its non-guaranteed inventory rose 111 percent from Q4 2008 to 2009.


But, while sites with strong vertical appeal and a wide audience can garner CPM rates of $10, $20 and even $300 -- sites like forum based communities have traditionally barely been able to squeeze out $0.50 CPM rates.  Advertisers frequently overlooked forum based communities as being the Wild West of the Internet.  Too unruly to focus their attention.

Yet something is afoot.  When, according to TechCrunch, a trio of Myspace execs -- Amit Kapur, Steve Pearman, and Jim Benedetto -- leave Myspace to begin work on an evolution of forums with $10 million in first round funding you know that something is going on. In the past few years, we have funding go into companies like Wetpaint, Blerp, Get Satisfaction and Crowdgather.  Altogether, according to Crunchbase, these companies have received close to $70 million in funding. 

Recently, another interesting development is going on.  While advertising on forums has traditionally been confined to display advertising there have been two instances in the past couple of months of social media campaigns taking place on forum communities.

The first was run by the ad network, Crowdgather, who according to them managed a  "campaign which ran primarily in December 2009 involved run of network display advertising, online word of mouth engagement, user adoption surveys, and a viral user-generated video contest on the newly created CrowdBlu website at www.crowdblu.com." We don't have word on the name of the client but the focus of the campaign was on Blu-ray adoption.

The second was run by PostRelease on behalf of Pioneer. PostRelease leverages the "sticky post" feature on forums which allows a message to be displayed prominently in the forum for a specified period of time.  The result were high click through rates and increased engagement.

Two does not make a trend but it appears with the growing focus on forums both in financing and targeted campaigns that something is going on in this sector.